Cooking with Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook
Prior to this book I was a complete Magento novice with very little experience of customising the functionality of the platform. After being given the task of creating my very own customised Magento build I needed a book that would give me quick solutions to my current problems without bogging me down with pages of theory.
Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook is packed full of useful Magento snippets ranging from customising the look of the store to optimising the site. The book is structured in such a way that it holds your hand throughout the development process. The first chapter begins with a brief introduction to why Magento is the perfect e-commerce platform to develop in today, along with some installation guides on setting up virtual hosts, SVN, PHP and MySQL.
The book is well laid out with clear and concise introductions at the beginning of each chapter, with quick tips and hints scattered throughout the book. I personally don’t like the font used for the filename and directory text could use some adjusting as it blends too much with the main body and becomes difficult to read against the bodytext at times.
Each ‘recipe’ is explained in a fair amount of detail in terms of describing what exactly is happening and why, which definitely helped me with the development of my Magento build. Complete PHP beginners may struggle to understand however as some of the explanations get quite technical.
In my opinion this book is a must have for the bookshelf for anyone ranging from Magento novices to ninjas, a true pleasure to read!