Book Reviews

Adam’s Review

Hello, it’s Adam from the Magento Blog here… yes I can review stuff too! Here’s my take on the Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook.

Something that can be easily overlooked if you’re the owner or indeed developer of any ecommerce website design is simply a question of whether you’re doing enough to promote the products on your site, which would lead to increased sales. After all, it’s always nice to make money out of these kind of things right? This can be through a combination of optimisation, related products, cross-sells, social media, intelligent categorisation and organisation of products, and effective point of sale on your storefront.

This book deals with the how to get the most out of your Magento website, how to use a lot of the features that may be a bit too complicated for inexperienced users to get to grips with without instruction, and how to ultimately boost the sales of the site. Without proper explanation, asking some clients to have a go at using the discount system is not dissimilar to asking them to ‘have a go’ at disabling an advanced nuclear explosive in 10 seconds… hmm, perhaps not that bad.

Content

In terms of content this book certainly covers a lot of ground:

• Basic SEO tips such as optimising text, sitemaps & meta data
• Adding to Google Base
• Upsells, related products, discounts and cross-sells
• Advertising promotions in the right way
• Interactivity in polls, reviews and tagging
• Multiple store setups (including a wholesale store)

Everything in the book is tactical though, meaning you don’t have to do it. But for those who have the time and inclination to try these techniques you can suddenly get a whole lot more out of the package than what normally appears available.

Readability

The book is very well written and even manages to describe the discount system in a clear and concise manner! Something which I struggle to do on a daily basis… It uses pictures for virtually everything, emboldens words which related to the website content, and uses numbered bullet points to break down instructions.

Overview

What’s nice about it is that it shows that there are other people out there who can actually use Magento and are skilled enough to publish about it. The book doesn’t reinvent the way we use Magento in any way and it doesn’t provide you with any complex scripts that will bring waves of new functionality to your site. If that’s what you’re after you’d be better off getting the Magento 1.3 PHP Developers Guide.

This book is like the user manual that Magento never had. If Magento was a creased shirt, this book is the iron. The person who wears the nicely ironed shirt will get the attention of the customer and make money from it.

Rob’s Review

A Little History

Before I start let me tell you something, I can’t cook that well. I can scramble a few eggs and perhaps stretch to a stir-fry every now and again but that’s about it. So it was with much trepidation that I approached this Magento guide, having cookbook in the title meant that I was instantly repelled. Silly, I know but that’s just the way it is. The red and green vegetation on the front of the book didn’t help matters either.

As always I digress, in a direction that is not only unhelpful but also somewhat confusing – even for me. Was I talking about food? Or was I about to review a Magento book?

Book it is, I’m not hungry.

First Impressions

When I heard about this book I was rather excited, not just for me as the developer but also for my customers. I felt that a book like this should be shared – the knowledge gained through reading it should be passed like a precious heirloom, father to son, developer to client. Even the title itself sent tingles through my spine, an E-commerce book that is actually teaching you how to sell your products. What could be better?

Let me first explain the worst-case scenario when it comes to e-commerce web design. A client wants a website built, they are an entrepreneur so they know that e-commerce is the way to go. However they know nothing about it. Meanwhile the developer, who has just finished building the site knows nothing about their customers business. They don’t even have a general idea of what sells and what doesn’t, they just make websites. What you are left with is an ecommerce website that has no target, no relationship with the customer, no cutting edge features and no hope of succeeding.

- No point.

The Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook was created specifically to rectify this scenario. It was written to merge developer and client in a way that produces the following:

1. The developer knows how to design an e-commerce website that can sell products effectively.
2. The client understands the strengths and limitations of Magento and can tailor, with the help of the developer, their ecommerce website to suit their products.

Basically this book is ideal for both developer/designer and for any client who owns a Magento store.

Overview

Here’s my brief overview of the content. When you develop a store you must optimise it. This is a fact of life. If you want customers they need to know where your store is, which means you need to rank high in the search engines for your products. This book teaches you some in-depth SEO techniques, especially on the product pages. It also shows you how to set up Google sitemaps and implement the Google product search feature. All of which is integrated into the Magento framework already but which a lot of people don’t know about or don’t even bother with.

This book also goes the extra mile when it comes to accommodating your overseas visitors. Letting you know in easy to follow steps how to set up multi-language Magento sites and all the extras that go along with it.

As for the process of reading this book you will find that for every detailed description of an event there is an even better visual demonstration. Written in easy to follow paragraphs and steps in a tutorial sort of manner. You will find that as soon as you have completed a chapter, you will not need to re-read it.

My honest opinion is that every Magento developer/designer or even store owner should own this book. There are so many useful tips and tricks in here that everyone should be privy to.

Out of 10 this baby is hitting 9 for me. That’s a high percentage, and I can guarantee that after you read this book you website will be hitting high too.

Go out and buy it!

Its that time again…the time when we put aside our computer screens and pick up a brand new “smelling of the earth” book. However – in our line of work it is almost impossible to avoid the subject of IT, Web Design or even E-Commerce. We don’t mind – in fact we relish these moments!

So without further ado let me introduce you to our upcoming book review:

Magento 1.3 Sales tactics cookbook (by William Rice)

What I am hoping for in this book is a lot of focus on the sales side of magento – what makes a good online business a good business – and how magento can make it happen.

We will be receiving this book from the fantastic people at www.packtpub.com, who so generously offered us this book to review and then next week we will publish our opinions on this book and give you an honest rating based upon our findings.

As always thanks for visiting our magento blog and if anyone else out there needs their books reviewing  – you know where to send them.

Magento 1.3: PHP Developer’s Guide by Jamie Huskisson – Review by Robert Kent

As you can see from this angelic image, we found the Magento 1.3: PHP Developers guide beside the pearly gates of heaven. Heaven-sent has never had a truer meaning than this, the length of time that we have waited for a decent developers guide for the Magento platform has seemed almost biblical…..

Now that time is at an end….kind of.

This book was first published in January 2010 as a guide for the 1.3 platform. Anyone reading this in march now knows that Magento has already reached the 1.4 stable status and thus might presume this book to be out of date and not very useful at all (quite harsh for a book that is slightly newer than 2 months old!). However will this guide – like all good guides – stand the test of time?

Now before I start my review let me say a couple of things about it’s intended audience. First of all this book is for a developer - hence the big title. If you are a designer with absolutely no PHP experience, I highly recommend you leave this book alone and go look for it’s slightly more attractive sister… “Magento 1.3: Theme Design” – by Richard Carter.

There are a few things that we look for in books – most importantly are the words printed within, however we all read and learn differently so it’s hard to give a definitive review of any printed page. Bearing this in mind I will attempt to divide this opinion into easy-to-swallow sugar-paper pieces (say that 10 times fast…).

And then judgment did begin…

Presumptions:

It is presumed that you will have a good understanding (and preferably a few years of experience ) in PHP5. It is also presumed (though not highly so) that you are using this guide in order to take you magento sites to the next level – literally hoist them up to somewhere you could not reach before. This means that you should at least know the layout and structure of a magento site – such as what is involved in the overall process of getting hard code to display, as a module, on a magento CMS or category page. This means knowing how a php file affects the phtml files which are in turn controlled by the XML files. It is also worth noting that it is also highly recommended to be somewhat proficient in XML when tackling this book. Otherwise you could <become><lost></lost></become>.

Coverage:

Amazingly, for such a compact book (this assessment is based on the old back-breaking HTML 4 libraries and bibles from back in the day) there is one hell of a lot of information contained within. This information is laid out in easy to follow chapters that take you through the process of creating said chapters in a step-by-step fashion. To give you an idea of the content for this book here are a few chapter titles of note:

• Building a payment module
• API Integration
• Magento’s Architecture

Not only are the chapters step-by-step but all source code in actually printed within – now this is really a big help as many a time I have had a book such as this where the only copy of the source code comes on the supplied disk – which inevitably I lose almost straight away. Literally as soon as the book has been opened the disk has buried itself behind my wardrobe or somehow lodged itself between neighboring buildings. It remains a mystery that I do not feel the need to solve, my only solution is avoidance of those kinds of books.

Basically this book talks to you about the ins and out of “extending” magento, why it is important and how best to approach it. Letting you get to grips with some of the deeper functionality of the Zend Framework and also outlining files and folder structures and telling you the importance of each.

It does help a beginner to the software understand the principles of the system very well – and all from a functionality point of view.

Where am I:

Where am I? That is a question that I have had to ask myself many a time when following a written PHP guide or some other developers book. It happens all of a sudden, some of you might know what I’m talking about, here’s how it goes…

You are following the guide willingly – all is going well – you are literally copying everything word for word…but then you suddenly realize you have no idea where you are, what you are doing or even what book you are reading…It is a very strange occurrence but it is a common symptom of copying text. It doesn’t go in and before you know it you have forgotten everything.

Does this happen with our featured book? No. No it doesn’t. Didn’t to me anyway…but I am puzzled as to why this is so. It does follow the same format as a lot of other guides that have caused me to fall victim to this symptom. I can only put it down to the fact that the tutorials really do flow quite nicely…

Unanswered Questions:

There are always unanswered questions when it comes to learning anything but I still thought that I’d be best to put this section in. Not that I have any unanswered questions – see below.

Overall:

I had no delusions when we gained possession of this book. I knew there would be no images of gorgeous web design and amazing flash animations. I knew this book would not show the design side of the functionality. I knew that this book was solely for the purpose of extending magento stores through the use of functions/xml and code snippets. I also knew that I would also be disappointed because of this.

Perhaps it is the small designer in me screaming in frustration but whenever I approach a website to slay it becomes a two headed hydra…you attack one neck with your arrays, loops and $variables – you attack the other with css/javascript and wherever possible some nice pretty colours.

If I were a pure programmer I would love this book and perhaps take it to bed with me……As I am not – this book will remain on my work desk – ready and willing whenever I need it. This means that my review for Magento 1.3: PHP Developer’s Guide is also a twin-headed beast, factored on my two frames of mind…

Pure Programmer – 9/10

Overall Developer – 6/10