Book Review: Magento 1.4 Development Cook Book by PacktLib

Posted in Development, Magento by B00MER

After receiving a copy of this book from PacktLib, I have finally had a chance to go over the book in more detail. With Magento already having released a newer version of 1.5, there are still lots of items within this book that still apply. This book definitely should be considered a “Cook book” with recipes on how to perform certain “baking” tasks within Magento. It really isn’t meant for someone who is wanting more in depth details into the internal workings of the Core of Magento. It is more of a consolidation of collective information available online in one nicely packaged readable book.

Pros:

Overall, the content of the book is in depth in the areas that it is covering. The optimization chapter is probably one of the best examples of this, as it covers many areas of optimization even small to mid size companies will need to harness to keep things responsive enough not to scare off potential customers, since Magento is so resource intensive. It covers everything from Memcache, APC/eAccelerator/XCache, Apache and MySQL optimizations best practices.

Cons:

Since it deals with a release that has been out for months some of the topics covered may not be as relevant, especially now that 1.5 is out. In one chapter there is a WordPress integration portion, where now there is a WordPress plugin and Magento Modules available that will do a lot of these things for you.

Conclusion:

If you are familiar with Linux environments, setting up Magento and have developed many modules before, you may not find this book very interesting. However with that said, if you do have some familiarity with Magento, Linux and Zend Framework but want to learn more with some walk-throughs on how to perform specific tasks like creating a widget, setting up memcache, etc. then you may find this book helpful and useful. It may be one of the books you would pick up a few times if your just starting to get your feet wet with Magento but I don’t see myself going back to it later on.

Overall my rating would be 4 out 5 stars:

To pick up a copy of your own both Hard and Electronic:
Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook.

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25Feb2011