The first chapter goes into the installation of Magento. From my own experience I encountered some problems during this installation, which was that Magento sometimes requires extensions such as the cURL library. Which wasn’t enabled on my PC at the time. I was pleased to find that the author had also written a notice about this problem. The rest of the installation is very detailed and includes many many screenshots throughout the entire book.

When you’re installation of Magento is ready, the author discusses the various things you can do with Magento. Such as adding categories, how to manage your tax rules, adding products, etc. This all may seem very easy. But when you’re a beginner and you don’t know a lot about websites. The huge administrator’s panel of Magento might frighten you at first, preventing you from using the great features it provides you. After having read this book I think you can be quite sure that you can tame this beast =).

However I haven’t really read all the chapters, so far only about 40-50 pages since I was trying to find out more about the technical aspects of the system. Such as the MVC framework it runs on and how the templating system works. Thats why I had stopped reading the book. So I would really recommend this book to anyone who wants to get to know more about using the system. But when you’re interested in getting to know more about how the PHP works, you might want to consider another book. But overall I think it’s a very good manual for beginners.

If you’d like to read a sample chapter of this book you can visit the following link:
http://www.packtpub.com/files/magento-sample-chapter-3-categories-and-attributes.pdf

You can find more detailed information about the book and how you can purchase it here:
http://www.packtpub.com/magento-beginners-guide?utm_source=vincentr.be&utm_medium=bookrev&utm_content=blog&utm_campaign=mdb_000800

I’d like to inform you that I’ve received a free copy of this book to review it, but that my opinion while reviewing it wasn’t really affected by this. Just so that you know that this review is as objective as possible. But if you’d like to get to know more about using the Magento system, this book should help you a lot.

I’m currently also spending some time on getting to know how frameworks work and what the best way is to build a custom CMS. Thats why I’ve ordered the book PHP5: CMS and Framework Development by Martin Brampton. So far it seems really interesting and has taught me a lot. This book also informs you about the way Mambo, Joomla and Aliro works because the author has developed many applications for these CMS and Framework. I might write a review about it soon but I still have a lot of pages to read and my time is limited at the moment. But I will most likely release some PHP application soon, maybe a shoutbox or tutorial so stay tuned!