Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide
Magento is a modern e–commerce platform. It is used by lots of companies in the world. Currently it is the most popular e–commerce application.
Magento is built on top of industry leading Zend Framework. It uses lots of modern technologies to offer best possible experience for shop customers.
I used to work with Magento for some time in a Snowflake project where we created a complex e–commerce solution for a major customer. Magento is very logical and flexible. Like with TYPO3, you can do almost anything with Magento but this flexibility comes with the other side: it is very complex.
I had troubles coding for Magento. There are very few programmer's resources on the Internet for Magento developers. There is no official programming guide.
There was a single book available for developers: php|architect's. I got that book long time ago but I was severely disappointed by it. Being a good programmer does not mean being a good author. The author of that book clearly knows a lot about Magento but he did not look to the book from a reader's view. His knowledge clouded him and he omitted lots of valuable pieces of information. Without those pieces the book turned into a non–finished puzzle. So it was not a big help. If you were to get php|architect's Magento book, save your money. It is not worth it.
Now we got a new book about Magento, it is from Packt and it is about development. I published several reviews of Magento books from Packt (like beginner's guide and themes). With this new book Packt Publishing has a complete coverage of Magento.
As you probably know, I am a big fan of Packt books. They are always very practical. Authors are always top professionals in the area where they write. So, did Packt make it well with a new Magento book? Let's see.
Quick facts
The book is published in standard Packt coloring and size (looks nice on the shelf, by the way). The author is Jamie Huskisson, whose client list includes NHS, Volkswagen and Nike, which is very impressive.
The book contains 233 pages (excluding index) and it is approximately 1.5 cm thick. Printed on a fine white paper with a glossy paperback cover.
There are 10 chapters in the book that cover most common task you may hit in your custom Magento projects.
Let's see it chapter by chapter.
Book contents
Here is chapter titles from the book:
- Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide
- Installing/Upgrading Magento and Preparing for Development
- Magento's Architecture
- Shipping Modules in Magento
- Building a Payment Module for Magento
- Building a Basic Featured Products Module
- Fully–Featured Module with Magento with Admin Panel
- Integration of Third–Party CMS
- Magento's Core API
- Importing and Exporting Data
As you see, the approach is fundamental: the book starts with installtion (including checking out the core from SVN), exploring the architecture, creating basic modules, then advanced modules and finally other tasks that developer may encounter in his work.
The architecture chapter gives the reader the basics. It is not realistic to describe all details of Magento architecture in a single chapter. Instead, the author focuses on the essential principles that Magento uses. These are principles that every Magento developer should know.
The nest two chapters are about the two most common development tasks for Magento: creating a payment and shipping module. This is a great start for both freelance developers, who plan to provide Magento services, and companies, who look into customizing Magento to their customers.
Product modules allow to create new types of products or show existing products in a new way. The book provides a chapter that describes a "Featured products" block. This block shows products in the Magento side bar using specially added attributes. This is a very useful example because it shows how to use one of the most important Magento concepts: attributes.
When the reader knows how to create a basic module, the book proceeds to the fully featured module with admin part. There are lots of important details here that you will not find anywhere else.
In other chapters the reader will find a description of other tasks that happen in Magento projects.
Conclusion
So is the book good? Yes, it is! I would definitely recommend this Magento book for anybody who is interested in any Magento development. It is the best book for Magento developers on the market.