Customer comments on this selection.
 Good Reference, Weaker Tutorial
Packt Publishing sent me a complimentary copy of "Building Website with Joomla! 1.5" by Hagen Graf to review. I specifically was interested in this book as I was researching the use of Joomla! as part of redoing an elementary school website.
First off, the book was well organized. It begins with an introduction to web content management systems and the role they play today in web sites, covers a brief history of Joomla!, and then focuses the rest of the book on the installation and configuration options. As a first time Joomla! user, I can definitely say that the book helped me out quite a bit in understanding the way things were configured. Chapters 4 through 12 focus on different areas of Joomla!, including menus, extensions, components, and content in sufficient detail to make a useful reference but in a way that a first time user can get through the configuration. As a reference, this is the book's strong point.
Where I was a bit disappointed was that I was look more for a tutorial, rather than a pure reference book. Given that I was setting up a new site using Joomla! for the first time, I was hoping for an extended step by step approach that would take me through a complete site development. While there is a chapter in the book called "A Website with Joomla!," it was only 12 pages long and was presented more in the context of a demonstration than a tutorial.
Overall, I was pleased with the book. I think it will be a useful reference as I develop the site, but I also think I've still got more work ahead of me to get the site out the door.
 Might Be Good For Beginners
This book might be good for beginners, but it depends on what kind of beginner you are. If you have no website building knowledge, then I think this may be a little confusing and may not work for you; but if you have some experience, then I think Joomla can be a powerful tool in helping you create a website and content exactly the way you envision it in your head. Installation is easy and once you've created a site it's easily managed. Take a chance, you might like it.
Great Tutorial Book
What a great book for beginners of the web world. Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 really is quite helpful in setting up and maintaining a website built on the popular framework.
The book has very well documented, with images, the Joomla! experience. Each chapter covers new topics to help you setup, edit, and maintain your site, and the content on the site.
The later chapters are helpful, and will whet your appetite for more if you are a programmer.
Beginners will be quite satisfied with this book, as it details in very easy to follow steps exactly how to get your site up, and working, and how to easily maintain and edit the site.
 If you want the basics...
Get this book, but don't expect much more. The first half of the book is a complete snore if you have done any web development in the past, this includes HTML as it is completely non-technical. This book also introduces somthing that I haven't seen in a technical text in a while and that would be an editorial piece. Maybe I'm light on open source reading but I don't really care so much about someone's opinion on why companies that do not share the authors opinion are selfish and only open source developers go to heaven.
It might not be that extreme, but it really has no place in a technical / educational text. If I want those opinions I'll buy a different book, I'm just trying to learn a bit about the software.
If you want the technical approach, order the WROX book. Does a much better job from the get go digging into the technical aspects of the project and leaves the ego stroking to others.
optimised for search engines!
Joomla [sorry, I just won't add that exclamation mark after it] is targeting the novice website designer and programmer. By some definitions, a designer need not be concerned with the messy details of actually making webpages. However, Joomla is easy enough to pick up that a designer might well be tempted to indulge in actual page design and generation.
It does aim at websites where the intent is for users to have a persistent login. To this ends, Joomla offers a separation of functions, for the user and for the administrator [you presumably]. As the book demonstrates, it's pretty easy for you to create user accounts. The specialisation for content management is shown when there is the concept of groups of users. Joomla offers Registered, Author, Editor and Publisher. With subsidiary groups of Manager, Administrator and Super Admin. The administrative tasks are done within a simple GUI that frees you from memorising arcane command lines.
Joomla also has an interesting functionality. It lets you, the website author or owner, publish Joomla-generated URLs that are search engine friendly. Various search engines tend not to store long URLs, where there are many arguments in these, after the host name. The assumption is that the URLs refer to dynamic [ie. transient] content. Hence there is little point to the engine storing these URLs, or the pages pointed to by them. But you want the engine to store your website's URLs, right? What Joomla does is rewrite the URLs in a more compact form, which improves the chances of an engine recording these. And thus offering your website in its free results.
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