Prof3ta

Finally, here we are with a new review on a Joomla! book. This is time for: Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5, edited by Packt Publishing. 

I'd like to start this review with a note: this book is not intended for developers, but for the final average users. I wanted to highlight this since - just to be honest - I found this work a bit trivial. But I guess this is essentially due to the fact I spent at least a couple of years working on Joomla! and developing extensions for this amazing CMS, while this book is simply aimed at explaining how to manage and maintain a Joomla! website. I was probably not the best person to review the book. For sure, I was not part of the intended audience for it.

Apart from this note, I need to say the book is very well organized and it presents a number of possible configurations and optimizations for a Joomla! website. A very large attention is dedicated to the Administration Application, presenting all the features available within the CMS with a really high level of detail.

After a brief introduction on terminology and concepts that need to be known by a final user, the book covers the installation procedure for the CMS, giving an easy answer to the most common questions that a basic user could have while installing Joomla! for the first time. Then, management of modules, components and plugins is faced, with a good number of practical examples. Languages and colors management are presented as well.

I loved the accuracy the author used to introduce the Administration panel, covered in a seriously detailed way. Template creation is presented in Chapter 13, but I've got the feeling is that the content for this section is too much for a basic user and too less for an advanced one. I noticed Packt Publishing released a specific book on template creation and design and, even if I still hadn't look at it, I guess that's a nice solution to learn more about Joomla! templates.

Chapter 12 revealed a nice surprise, covering some of the most common extensions available on the web for the Joomla! CMS: forums, document managers, photo-galleries. Appendix F needs to be mentioned, too, since it's covering one of the most troubling procedures in maintaining a Joomla! website: migrating from version 1.0 to 1.5 of the framework.

My final opinion on the book is that it could be useful for a very basic user, someone that has 0% knowledge about programming and just decided to use Joomla! for a new website. All advanced users should simply skip this book, focusing on others book available from Packt Publishing.

Erlang Factory is out!!!

In the last period I worked on a new project for my Company: the so called Erlang Factory. Erlang is an amazing programming language oriented to the concurrent software development. You can learn more about the language by visiting its home page.

The Erlang Factory promises to be the largest gathering of Erlang expertise, involving conferences, courses, tutorials and much more, together with some of the most brilliant and famous Erlang programmers in the World.

The Erlang Factory project is growing and growing and it definitely deserves a look. Don't miss it.

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.

A couple of days ago, I've just found out a nice shortcut to take a screenshot on my iPhone 3G and to save it among the other photos. Just hold the HOME button for a while and simultaneously press the SLEEP/WAKE button. That's it. :)