Prof3ta

The Packt Publishing company just sent me another book to review: Learning Joomla! 1.5 - Extension Development -, written by J.L. LeBlanc. The book turned out much more than interesting, covering plenty of issues related to extension development in Joomla!

Let's start from saying the book is a must if you want to start developing your own Joomla! extensions. It cannot be considered as a reference manual for the developer, of course. It rather represents a sort of huge tutorial, in which you will learn how to build high quality Joomla! components, modules and plugins. The amount of sample code contained in the book is simply amazing and it is possible for the customer to download such code directly from the book home page.

We should say that almost all the information contained in the book is available online from different (and mostly free) sources (the official Joomla! documentation and the numerous wiki and forums on the topic, just to start), but the way the information is packed into this book fully deserve the book itself to be bought. If the book had been published two years ago, I would have saved a lot of time when writing my thesis, looking for the best way to write my own Joomla! extensions.

Just as an advise, don't stop to the book content. Even if it is fine to write your first Joomla! extensions, dig into details and search for additional examples on the Internet. Moreover, the Joomla! framework is quite flexible. Don't stop at the provided solutions. If you feel you have a better solution for a specific problem, implement your idea and compare it with the one proposed in the book. Which is the better? And why?

The book is even a good way to learn how to check pre-existing extensions and to find errors and bugs within them, before integrating them into your own Joomla! installation.

A lot of additional topics are covered by the book, starting from modal boxes and arriving to raw formats, passing through the jQuery libraries and MooTools. Chapter 8, in the specific, represented a nice surprise for me, covering JavaScript issues related to the extension development (that I actually needed to struggle with when developing my own extensions!!!).

Just as a final note, I'd really like to see more content about testing and cover reports in these kind of books. Apart from that, I recommend this book to every Joomla! developer, from the beginner to the more experienced one.