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Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook ReviewI am making a point not to review the language used in the book however, it is necessary to note that the English language purist, would have a few remarks on the grammar, spelling and overall construction of sentences. The book also employs a jovial and fun writing style which may or may not please readers of technical books. Having said that, the book is still very readable and once the reader becomes used to the writing style, the ability to understand the material is not impaired.
The book is aimed at PHP developers who want to boost their Magento skills. It claims that basic PHP knowledge is necessary but no prior Magento experience. Knowing that Magento is a very complex piece of software, this statement was somewhat surprising to me and indicated a promise that, I'd say, is not so easy to keep.
The material covered in the book stretches over a wide variety of topics oriented towards but not exclusively limited to developing with Magento. In the first chapter we learn how to set up a development environment using svn, a LAMPP (XAMPP) stack and Netbeans for the development IDE. Then we get an overview of working with some Magento design and CMS features such as customizing the error page and adding an RSS feed to your site. Chapter 3 goes into adding extra functionality to your Magento site by integrating WordPress, adding a Lightbox and jQuery (!). Covered next are topics on customizing a store, addressing working with the product catalog and adding a professional touch to your site. Then we get a quick glance at working with the Magento database directly. Chapter 8 is solely devoted to creating a Magento module (or extensions) from scratch, followed by more chapters on adding functionality to Magento via modules and widgets. The final two chapters discuss the performance optimization and debugging and unit testing techniques.
As we can see, the topics are quite ambitious for the just over 250 pages.
It is important to bear in mind that this is a `recipe' book which means that due to the very nature of the format, the individual recipes are small, short and self contained pieces of functionality that, in theory, could be applied immediately to solve a certain problem. This, in turn, means that the author doesn't have the luxury of delving deeper into the topic at hand which has the effect of leaving readers wanting for more clarity and explanation in some chapters.
Personally, I would argue that the `recipe' book format may not be the most suitable for writing about complex topics such as Magento, especially if the goal is to advance one's in-depth knowledge and learn more advanced aspects of developing with Magento. While we end up with useful snippets of core or steps for performing certain tasks, we never quite get enough background information in order to fully understand why things work. Granted, the Author tries to add value under the "How it Works" parts of each recipe but, again, the format constraint doesn't allow for lengthy elaborations.
Be that as it may, let's see in more detail, what we can learn and apply by working through this book.
Content
The book is supposed to cover Magento 1.4 development, however, while reading it, I couldn't escape the feeling that parts were written with Magento 1.3.x in mind and possibly later adapted for 1.4. Magento 1.4 changed a few things from 1.3.x, notably the way that the design themes are handled but the book still uses the Magento 1.3.x paradigm of adding extension designs to the default/default theme as opposed to the base/default.
Each recipe starts with the title of the recipe, an optional "Getting ready" paragraph outlining the prerequisits for the recipe, the "How to do it..." part containing the steps, actions and code for the execution of the recipe and the "How it works" part, where the recipe is explained. Sometimes a certain topic will be covered over several recipes where subsequent recipes build upon covered material.
So let's see what each chapter has to offer.
Chapter 1
A lot of development books will start with tips on how to set up an environment for development. Here we learn how to set up our local development server with Apache, MySQL and PHP and create our local development site via an Apache virtual host entry. We then set up the subversion (svn) client and check out the latest Magento version form the Magento svn repository. The author shows us how to set up some MySQL GUI tools and create the Magento database. Subsequently, he shows us how to set up our development environment using the Netbeans IDE and finally explains the relevant directories in a default Magento installation.
The topics covered here are straightforward development procedures that are well known to practicing developers and can comfortably be skipped. One note I have is that it would have been nice to state the alternative way of installing Magento using the official download as well as an alternative to using svn. Personally, I prefer using git for all my Magento projects and don't bother with checking out Magento code via svn. The svn approach may be more relevant in the case of wanting to keep up to date with the very latest bleeding edge Magento development for research and testing purposes.
Chapter 2
In this chapter we are immediately plunged into editing some theme phtml files. Curiously, here, we can see that the author is aware of the app/design/frontend/base structure of Magento 1.4 but later in the book we have references to the older style of Magento 1.3.x. Also, we seem to be encouraged to edit the template files directly. It would have been good to first outline the procedure of setting up your own design package and theme and use that as the basis of all customizations.
Nevertheless, we learn how to add a home page link to the default navigation, alter the document title, customize the 404 page, add adwords tracking to the order confirmation page, add a custom CMS layout template, add an RSS feed displaying the last 5 tweets from a Twitter account. We also learn how to place the built in contact form into a CMS page and integrate the Flash based JW Image Rotator on the home page.
Logically, some of the recipes are already in the territory of modules but those are covered much later in the book. At this point, we have to accept this and trust the author. No doubt that some of the recipes here will be useful to beginners starting out with Magento, but there is little new ground covered for someone who has already worked with Magento.
Chapter 3
This chapter promises more excitement starting with a recipe on how to integrate WordPress into Magento. After that we see how to add a new CMS page in the Magento admin, add jQuery support and a 3D rotating tag cloud and integrate the Lightbox 2 in our product pages. Finally, we edit the site footer template and insert a block of accepted payment method images.
Once again, practical recipes achieving several useful goals, but...
For me, the WordPress recipe is too simplistic. It simply shows how to install WordPress and theme it so it matches your Magento theme and that's it. There are several other methods of integrating WordPress but none have been mentioned.
I also have a problem with the jQuery recipe. As the author himself says, Magento already comes with the Prototype and Scriptaculous JS frameworks so why add more weight to the site by installing jQuery? Understandably, jQuery has more fantastic plugins and performs better but ultimately I would avoid adding a whole new JS library to a Magento store if page load and rendering performance is important. A warning or note around that would have been sufficient.
Chapter 4
This chapter is titled "Customizing a Store". It is a mix of admin user guide showing us how to use the built in Google Optimizer features, create custom variables for use in email templates, enable Google Analytics and create catalog and shopping cart price rules for your promotional activity. The other recipes will teach how to delete orders, create a featured product and a custom admin theme.
Mostly novice material but it was useful to see how to quickly create featured products and a custom admin theme if you want to alter the admin branding for your clients. I had an issue with the deleting orders recipe (by installing a free extension from Magento connect) as this functionality is omitted from Magento on purpose but it was referring to deleting orders performed while testing the store under development. I would not recommend leaving this extension accessible to a store owner when the store goes live.
Chapter 5
is called `Playing with Products' and, again for the most part, is a guide to the Magento admin back end surrounding the catalog and products. We are shown how to set up the catalog configuration, load shipping rates for the Table Rate shipping method, create a configurable product and insert a YouTube video in the product description field. The other recipes cover adding a Facebook `Like' button on the product page and adding a product to the cart via using a URL query string.
This chapter feels like it's definitely targeted towards the Magento novice and there is not much to learn if you already have some Magento experience under your belt.
Chapter 6
Entitled "Adding a Professional Touch to your Site" I can't see what that has to do with installing Magento on PHP 5.3.2 where mcrypt is not available. Also, the other recipes just tell us how to set up some admin configuration values in order to optimize the store for SEO and enable PayPal. All these are user manual material.
Chapter 7...Read more›
Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook OverviewThis book is a collection of straightforward recipes to build a faster and more impressive Magento store. The recipes will give you the optimum solutions for common and complex problems you face while developing a Magento store by writing effective custom modules and widgets. The recipes are explained in simple English and are easy to understand and implement in your projects. If you are a PHP developer or a software engineer, novice or experienced, interested in achieving high impact in a fast-paced development environment and want to boost your PHP/Magento development skills to the next level then this book is for you. No prior experience with Magento is required but basic knowledge of PHP is needed.
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