Location: Home » Books » Programming » Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website

Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website

Author: Barrie M. North
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$44.99~~
Buy New: $28.07
You Save: $16.92 (38%)

New (36) Used (7) from $28.07

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

31 reviews
Sales Rank: 2885

Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 1

ISBN: 0136135609
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.78
EAN: 9780136135609

Publication Date: December 21, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.

Similar Items:

•	Beginning Joomla!: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional)
•	Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development: Creating Modules, Components, and Plugins with PHP
•	Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5
•	Professional Joomla! (Programmer to Programmer)
•	Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development

Editorial Reviews:

Product Description

The First Easy-to-Use Guide to Joomla!-The World’s #1 Open Source Content Management System

If you want to build sophisticated websites that can be easily edited and updated, you need to master Joomla!-the world’s #1 open source content management system. Now there’s an easy-to-read, easy-to-use guide to Joomla! for every site manager, administrator, and developer. Leading Joomla! consultant Barrie North covers all you need to get results: installation, administration, site organization, template development, content updates, and a whole lot more. You’ll find never-before-published tips, tricks, and troubleshooting solutions, as well as three start-to-finish case studies.

New to Joomla? No problem! This book starts with the simplest design and system concepts, and builds your expertise step-by-step. You’ll rapidly master Joomla!’s power, even if you have no content management, scripting, or CSS expertise. Experienced with Joomla!? You’ll turn to this book constantly for its authoritative, plain-English, example-rich Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5 reference content.

Understanding content management, what Joomla! does, and how its components fit together

Building Joomla! sites from scratch, and systematically customizing them to your needs

Organizing content with sections, categories, blogs, and tables

Creating dynamic pages and effective navigation

Working with Joomla! modules and components

Search engine optimization for Joomla! sites

Start-to-finish case studies: building a school website, an e-commerce site, and a blog

The most valuable Joomla! extensions and add-ons: finding them, and using them

Key differences between Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5, and what they mean to you

About the Website

The accompanying site for the Joomla 1.5 book, provides five fully functional Joomla! sites with live follow-along examples from the book and up-to-date information on Joomla! The site also includes

An active forum where you can ask questions specific to chapters from the book from a Joomla expert
5 fully functional Joomla 1.5 live follow-along examples from the book. You can browse the sites and their backends live online.
Downloads of 5 free websites for Joomla 1.5 based on various chapter of the book. These are SQL dumps you can import to instantly give you a completed Joomla site.
4 free tutorial templates and 3 free templates from joomlashack.com including the popular commercial template - JS Aqualine!

Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...

3 out of 5 stars

Joomla! A User's Guide Covers the Basics June 24, 2008
This book covers most of the basics of how to set up a Joomla-powered website. Some of the concepts in Joomla are confusing or have misleading labels. Author Barrie North admits as much in several places throughout the book where he says something like "now here's the confusing part." Thankfully, by carefully reading the book and working along with the examples most of those confusing aspects of the software are elucidated.

However, where the book falls short is that it fails to clearly pull together all the disparate parts of the Joomla system into a coherent picture of how they work together to form the whole. The author does make an attempt at this and the text does provide some help in this regard. But I felt that there were still a few important gaps in my understanding by the time I finished reading the book. Fortunately, after about one more day of exploring the software on my own things started to gel for me. The book does give you all the basics but could tie things together better.

Finally, the quality of the writing is closer to what you might expect to find in a readme.txt file than in a book from a major publisher (Prentice Hall). I lost track of the number of times, the author uses the word "actually" -- a much overused word today. I'm not surprised to hear the word used gratuitously in conversation but I am disappointed to find this kind of writing in a book that lists for $45. And it's not just the colloquialisms that annoy. I found that the author's technical explanations were frequently perfunctory. When explaining a parameter it would be helpful to not simply state exactly what it controls but what its larger significance is or how it can be used. That sort of explanation is not always provided.

But, in spite of these complaints the book did serve as a useful tutorial that got me over the hump in understanding Joomla. Prior to ordering the book I had watched/read a number of free online tutorials but after a while I found that my understanding had plateaued at a low level. Searching for more tutorials to fill the gap became a time-wasting exercise. By working through this book I was able to reach a new plateau which should now allow me to confidently configure my own system.

5 out of 5 stars

Exceptional, Straight-forward and Well-written Book June 22, 2008
This book straight up rocks. It has got me off the ground and realizing the opportunity to provide quality websites with a lot less long term knowledge of programming. It's easy to read, has plenty of information, for instance, search engine optimization, without trying to be the expert or claiming any guarantees. Just straight forward, real world info that's easily digestible and the best book on Joomla! 1.5 you'll find. If you want to learn Joomla! 1.5, buy this book.

3 out of 5 stars

Joomla User's Guide Useful June 17, 2008
Helpful. Reasonably up-to-date (for a subject that changes all the time). Clearly written and presented. Offers useful suggestions for online resources. Often assumes greater than beginner's knowledge - the chapter on CSS was impenetrable to me. Introductory chapters clear in explaining principles behind Joomla as a content management system. Could have done with more detail on how to alter templates.

4 out of 5 stars

Exactly what I needed June 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Staring learning Joomla I found that some parts of it are quite obvious and some are not. Without going into programming details, this book explains the work you need to do to make a Joomla website. For me it was important to find explanation on how to create your own templates. I also found important information about installing and working with Joomla, localy and on a server. Certainly I had a lot of benefits by reading this book.

1 out of 5 stars

Worst beginners manual ever June 5, 2008
0 out of 5 found this review helpful

Don't get this book if you are new to joomla. That would be a devastating mistake. You will pull all your hair out in frustration.

I bought Barrie North's book because of the reviews on this Amazon site. I suspect the positive reviews were written by the author's friends or people who were already familiar with joomla. I felt obligated to correct the record.

The author seem very knowledgeable and this book contains plenty of useful information, but it also has several flaws:

Worst flaw is that, frequently, when walking the reader through a series of steps, he will overlook something important - I guess he assumes we already know stuff. This was tremendously frustrating. I spent hours trying to figure out missing links through the joomla forum and online tutorials.

The organization, descriptions and language are badly flawed. The author tries to use a conversational tone, but it is very annoying and confusing to frequently read useless phrases like 'as you can see' - especially when you can't. About half the narrative is filler like that. I had to re-read many paragraphs 3-4 times to understand them. (BTW, I have a PhD and read and write technical papers all the time.)

After five frustrating, headache-filled days (I kept giving him the benefit of the doubt that it would get better - it never did), I bought 'Beginning Joomla' by Dan Rahmel and had joomla working properly in a few hours. (First, I cleared my mind and computer of everything I had attempted under this book's guidance.)

Let this be your second or third joomla book, but not your beginner.

Discount Shopping Online by Web-Mart.com