"Magento: Beginner's Guide" by William Rice
Magento Commerce is the most modern and user–friendly e–commerce system that currently exists. It is written in PHP, it is open source and it uses AJAX to please customers with quick responses to their queries for products or to checkout quickly.
As any such system, Magento is very sophisticated and it is not a system that you can learn in five minutes. It needs investment of time but than your possibilities are almost unlimited.
Magento web site has a link to a user manual. Unfortunately it cannot be downloaded for convenient reading as an offline printed guide. So options for learning Magento are limited. Oh, sorry, they were quite limited until Packt Publishing published a new book by William Rice, which is called "Magento: Beginner's guide". I can consider myself as a beginner in Magento, so I jumped on board and got a copy of the book from Packt. Let's see about this book!
The Magento book
The book consists from eleven chapters and an appendix. Here is the table of contents (chapter tiles only):
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: Installation
- Chapter 3: Categories and Attributes
- Chapter 4: Taxes
- Chapter 5: Adding Simple Products
- Chapter 6: Minimum Customization of Your Store's Appearance
- Chapter 7: Beyond Simple Products
- Chapter 8: Customer Relationships
- Chapter 9: Accepting Payment
- Chapter 10: Configure Shipping
- Chapter 11: Fulfilling an Order
- Appendix A: Abbreviated Step-by-Step Directions
Looks very promising, doesn't it?
The introduction is quite short. It tells you what this book as about and makes a tour of the demo store. You see what Magento can do for you.
The second chapter describes Magento installation. Do not think you can bypass it. Installing Magento is not a piece of cake! This chapter does not only tell you how to unpack Magento, it also provides very useful tips about doing stuff during the installation. In additional you will find how to install Magento on various operating systems, using web control panels (cPanel) or with various hosting providers (like Dreamhost). I never saw such a deep installation chapter in any book before. It is really a time saver in many cases.
Chapter 3 discusses a very important topic: categories and attributes. If I had this book, I would not have spent hours trying to set up my first demo shop properly a couple of months ago! Rice easily guides me and you how we should organize categories and attributes (and why we should do it exactly this way). This chapter is really a "core" concept for the Magento because it tells you how to make your store effective for the customers.
Chapter 4 is about taxes. No one likes taxes. Taxes are complex and different in every country. In this chapter you will learn everything you need to know about taxes.
Chapter 5 is about adding products. Adding products is not just pressing a couple of buttons. It is a work that you should do carefully. If the description is very small, not exact and lacks pictures, customers may decided not to buy in your shop. William Rice guides you how to add products properly and even optimize them for search engines.
Chapter 6 of the book is about changing your store's appearance. You really want to give it unique look! Branding is important. The book not only tells you about appearance in this chapter but also teaches how to add various blocks, such as polls, callouts, product comparison, etc. Yes, Magento has all that and the book tells you how to use it! (You see, I am very fascinated about this book!)
Chapter 7 is about special types of products. Magento supports grouped products and products, where you can makes some attributes selectable (like T–shirt size, for example). This chapter tells you how do it. It is really an advanced technique. In addition you learn how to created "tiered" products and give discounts if a customer buys some products together. (I again scream "Fantastic!" to myself)
Chapter 8 is about customer accounts. What can I say more here? It is just about that: how to manage your customers in the Magento store.
Chapter 9 is about accepting payments. Magento supports a huge number of payment processing systems and new systems can be installed as plugins. It also tells you a difference between a merchant account and payment processor, which you should read very carefully if you are going to use PayPal, Authorize.net or PayFlow.
Chapter 10 is about shipping. No, it is not about wrapping your product carefully! It is about connection to DHL, UPS, FedEx and so on. Professional shipping is one of the things customers love. So pay attention to this!
Chapter 11 discusses order fulfilment. Basically this is all about order processing from customer placing the order to shipping the order. The chapter also has a practical example where the reader is expected to process the order.
Appendix A is like a whole book in one condensed chapter. This does not replace the whole book but rather serves as a very good summary of the book. This helps you to walk the whole process once again and remember it thoroughly.
My impression about the book
The book is fantastic! I wish I could have all my owned books written like this. Instructions are clear, detailed and precise. Each chapter includes a lot of tips and advises. This book is the only thing you need to learn Magento and use it for having a great e–commerce solution!
Conclusion: I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the Magento e–commerce solution! Even if you have experience with Magento, this book will be helpful.
Thanks to the Packt Publishing for yet another excellent book!
Time for action!
Each chapter in the book has "Time for action" sections where you can do stuff you learnt. So here is my "Time for action" section for this book:
- Read a sample chapter (Categories and attributes)
- Buy the book
- If you use TYPO3, install a TYPO3 Magento extension (from Forge, not from TER!) and create your TYPO3 Magento shop!