This book from Packt Publishing is aimed at the new developer or designer amongst the Joomla! community. It covers development of a basic restaurant review extension, including the development of a component, modules and a few search related plugins. It also includes the design and packaging for each part of the extension for Joomla 1.5.
As this book is new, the codebase is tested on Red Barchetta, Joomla 1.5 Beta 2. Joseph's writing style is clear, concise, and throughout the 160 or so pages, he offers helpful tips to help keep your application well formed. It also covers the new codebase design, new plugin events, and changes to the installer sequence.
As a senior developer and designer within the Mambo and Joomla! community, having been developing now for over 4 years, I found the book a little lightweight for the mature, complex development work I engage in. However, if you're just starting out coding for Joomla! 1.5, this book is for you. This book would also be of benefit in graphic and web design schools in order to reskill for content management system development.
My suggestions for the next edition of this book include possibilities beyond a single application. The potential to leverage Joomla 1.5 in new ways is of benefit and if new users can learn the best new practices in a such a technically focussed book as this one, it will increase the overall market share for Joomla!. I'd also recommend it deals with the new direction taken by the Core Team in terms of GPL compliance for Joomla! as it would help up and coming developers code correctly licenced applications in light of the ongoing discussion regarding legality of extension code.
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