Book Review: "Joomla! Explained" by Stephen Burge

August 31st, 2011 at 5:00 PM CEST in Books

"I wish I had this book a couple of years ago when I was learning Joomla! by trial and error."

Amongst the 275 books listed on Amazon about the subject 'Joomla', Stephen Burge's 'Joomla! Explained' is the top rated item. In this blog I'll explain why the #1 position is a suitable spot for this book and how almost any Joomla user - both absolute beginners and seasoned experts - can extract valuable information from this book.

Baby steps

The target audience of Joomla! is very diverse. From the 9-year old Liam (already maintaining over 25 Joomla! websites!) to people in their 90s, from users barely able to handle a mouse to developers building complete frameworks and from people spending $1 a month on their site's hosting to companies making multi-million dollar profits from the project. Stephen might seem to have taken the easy route by limiting this target audience severely, as he describes in his blog post 'Joomla! Explained and Why Writing a Book is So Damn Hard':

"In the introduction I mention that I wrote the book for my Dad. I firmly believe that Joomla should be easy enough for anyone to learn. If my Dad can use Joomla, so can you and your family."

However, by taking this approach, he forced himself to explain every baby step he took in detail. This resulted in an expert (which Stephen clearly is) writing a book about Joomla! 1.6 and 1.7 that is both comprehensible for beginners and doesn't belittle seasoned Joomla! users. A great achievement I might say!

CASh workflow is right on the money

A core aspect of 'Joomla! Explained' is the 'CASh workflow'. It describes how you should Categorize, Add and Show almost every type of content you'll add to Joomla. By taking this approach, you can prevent yourself from having a big load of uncategorized articles, menu items linking nowhere, content items without a link to them, etc.

Stephen uses the CASh workflow throughout the book to describe how to add content, news feeds, contacts and almost every other imaginable asset in Joomla. By using a consistent approach to this, novice users will start seeing a pattern and have something to fall back to when they encounter a new form of content to be added.

Really? Is there nothing negative about this book?

So far I haven't written a single negative word about this book. While I could've ended this blog with a short round of applause for Stephen, some of you might start to think that he sent me this book with the promise of a free beer at an upcoming Joomla!day if I wrote a positive review about it. This is not the case (even though I would be interested in having a beer - free or paid - with Stephen at an upcoming Joomla!day)! The truth is, it's just a darn good book, which makes it hard for me to find negative aspects of it.

The only real downside I can think up would be that it's rather lengthy. The book measures almost 2.5 centimeters in height and contains over 400 pages of content. One has to be really dedicated to learning Joomla! in order to start reading a book that exceeds in both height and volume some of the books I had to read at the university. However, if I think back at the countless hours I spent trying to figure out Joomla by trial and error, reading this book would probably have been a much more efficient way to spend my time.

Get 'Joomla! Explained' now for a little over $20, I promise you won't regret it.