Joomla! 1.7 - Beginner's Guide [Kindle Edition]

After working on corporate internal websites for over 15 years, I decided it was time to build my own personal site. I found a cheap host and picked out my domain. The hosting company had a number of free applications you could install. These were primarily open source products; Joomla being one of them. After researching the options available, I chose Joomla due to its favorable press and strong user group community backing it. While it doesn't appear to be in huge use in the USA, it definitely is abroad; figured these folks must be onto something. So my next stop was educating myself in the technology. Which meant a trip to Amazon to see what e-books were available for my kindle. (I only buy e-books.) I look at many and settled on this one. I chose it because the sample contained a TOC that definitely contained the topics I was interested in and the cost was well within my means. I prefer books which get to the point quickly and teach me what I want to know so I can get up and running quickly. I was not looking for a "bible" on the subject; though I don't rule out such books for the future once I have messed with the technology enough and moved to an Intermediate level.

So what did I think of this book? As my review title indicates, I found this book to be just what I was looking for. The author focuses on the bare bones of how a Joomla site works and how you can customize it. I bought the book on a Sunday night and spent all day Monday messing with Joomla. The e-book on one screen (using the Amazon cloud reader; love it!) and my Joomla site on the other. Worked wonderfully and I learned a great deal.

I should note that the author includes some one page ads in the book. There were probably ten of them and if I remember correctly they were all Joomla-related. Considering the low cost of ownership of the book itself, the ads didn't bother me. I can buy a magazine for about the same money and get many more ads which are annoying and distracting; these were not to me.

I note too that while the title of this book is Joomla 1.7 - Beginner's Guide, I am very suspicious that it was originally written for Joomla 1.6. In Chapter 25 the author states, "My intention was to guide you through Joomla! 1.6..." I think he relabeled the book to make it more marketable after updating some of the content. Despite missing this old reference, I found that for me and my installation of Joomla 1.7, this book was fine. There were some small differences which I attribute to changes between 1.6 and 1.7; but not enough to make me think a lot less of the book. It was still very useful.

Overall I definitely recommend this little book for those of you getting started with Joomla. Nicely done!

This book was a recommended read and as such, being a Joomla newbie, I bought it automatically. Probably a bit daft, but it turned out to be a gold mine of information. The articles are well laid out and each topic is described in terms that a complete idiot, me, can understand. The tech stuff is there too. It's a good balance in my opinion. Very glad I bought it.

Fails to live up to being a creditable source. This book provides some good information; however, the misspellings and typos are so extensive it causes one to doubt the credibility of the authors. It is very apparent the authors did not even bother to spell check this document. At one point I encountered 5 typos within one page!...very distracting. In many cases they bring up questions and fail to provide adequate answers, you are left hanging. All in all, I recommended finding another source, one who cares about what they sell.