PHP Programmer

Over the past year or so, writ­ing for Milk Your Money has led me on an impres­sive jour­ney through the wide spec­trum of top­ics sur­round­ing per­sonal finance, the econ­omy and money in gen­eral. I have met some awe­some peo­ple and have learned much more than I would have pre­vi­ously imag­ined. This path has led in sev­eral direc­tions, some­times in sev­eral at once. One of the meth­ods that proves itself over and over in some shape or form is the idea of tak­ing con­trol for your­self and mak­ing money on your own terms. We can break this down even fur­ther and apply a dig­i­tal twist. Meet Magento, the open source ecom­merce sys­tem writ­ten pri­mar­ily in PHP. Where is the best place to start? At the begin­ning of course! William Rice has recently (as of March 2009) writ­ten a guide that takes a begin­ner through the ini­tial process of set­ting up and oper­at­ing an online store. He doesn’t sug­gest that you are going to put Ama­zon out of busi­ness, but if you are com­mit­ted and ded­i­cate the time and resources you will be able to sell with some level of success.

Gen­eral
One of the over­all themes that William Rice main­tains is that it is impor­tant to plan in the begin­ning as much as you can in order to save a great deal of time later down the road. As a reader, I can see the advan­tage to read­ing through this guide sev­eral times before even down­load­ing the appli­ca­tion. There are quite a few key things that need to be clar­i­fied early on in the process.

Another impor­tant tone that the author threads through the guide is thor­ough­ness. While only a frac­tion of the fea­tures are cov­ered here, the essen­tials are dis­cussed in full along with com­mon errors that peo­ple have made in the past that you should avoid. Some parts may seem tedious, but they are no less impor­tant. You will have a much deeper under­stand­ing of how the sys­tem works as well as appre­ci­ate it much more.

Pros:
– The biggest pos­i­tive aspect of this book is the fact that it is so acces­si­ble. Its writ­ten for the user in terms that are easy to under­stand and fos­ters a curi­ous atti­tude.
– Of course my favorite aspect of this book is the absolute thor­ough­ness of the top­ics cov­ered. Some might see this as a neg­a­tive and some­what bor­ing, but this isn’t the lat­est Harry Pot­ter book: its a guide to set­ting up an extremely pow­er­ful con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem for an online store.
– The top­ics are quite lit­er­ally every­thing you need to know, step-by-step.
– The struc­ture of how the infor­ma­tion is pre­sented is also well done, although the head­ers could have been a lit­tle more for­mal, AT the end of each chap­ter there is a recap and the actual steps are dis­played.
– Pic­tures are in color (at least the copy I received is) and while that might seem triv­ial, I think it makes a dif­fer­ence. I have even seen quite a few Pho­to­shop books that are in black and white.

Cons:
– I do have a few things about the book that I would have changed. For starters, I was some­what dis­ap­pointed at the bound­aries in the scope that book carved. It might have just been a mat­ter of hav­ing some expe­ri­ence with PHP (and IT in gen­eral) that I was chomp­ing at the bit for more. This could be con­strued as a pos­i­tive thing but it was frus­trat­ing.
– I also thought that there could have been more expla­na­tion for some of the fun­da­men­tals for a begin­ner. Explain­ing image siz­ing for exam­ple is an impor­tant aspect that any web designer in any capac­ity should under­stand and grasp firmly. It would have taken just a decent a para­graph or two but the author was almost too strict in stick­ing with the scope of the book.
– One other short­com­ing I want to point out is that there a lack­ing in cus­tomer the­ory in that I would have liked to read more to get inside the cus­tomers head as to why things are the way they are and why. This could be argued that its sim­ply a trial and error endeavor and this is just the way it is. Its also out of the scope of a begin­ners book and hope­fully there will be a lit­tle more “user sci­ence” in an advanced ver­sion, if there is one.
– Design and cus­tomiza­tion could have been addressed more although, again, this is the begin­ners guide.

My Wish List for an Advanced Guide:

* Mul­ti­ple path­ways for pay­ment (eg, can a pay­ment be split in two dif­fer­ent accounts)
* What is the patch­ing process?
* Batch pro­cess­ing for prod­ucts?
* What if the prod­uct is sim­ply down­load­able? Can you remove all ship­ping options?
* More on themes/skins/customization
* More of the fea­tures that make Magento so pop­u­lar.
* What is the user thinking?

Sum­mary:
It might seem as though I was harsh but over all I am very pleased with this book and if I were seri­ous about set­ting up an online store this would be an indis­pen­si­ble resource to get started. Pick it up if you are com­mit­ted to start­ing an online store.