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Michael J. Ross writes "In the past, a Web developer tasked with building an online store would most likely do so using a dedicated e-commerce system, instead of a content management system (CMS), because even though the leading CMSs offered more features and flexibility, they did not provide robust e-commerce capabilities, such as product listings, bulk import, pricing in multiple currencies, a built-in shopping cart, and integration with tax and shipping information sources. Since that time, e-commerce systems have become more like CMSs, by adding features such as blogging and forums. At the same time, CMSs are continually expanding their e-commerce potential, usually in the form of developers adding plug-ins. For developers using Drupal, there traditionally have been two major e-commerce plug-ins (known as "modules"): Ubercart and e-Commerce. The former has emerged as the leader, and is explored in Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Drupal e-commerce with Ubercart 2.x author George Papadongonas and Yiannis Doxaras pages 364 pages publisher Packt Publishing rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1847199201 summary A detailed guide to using Drupal and Ubercart to make a virtual store. This book was published by Packt Publishing on 22 March 2010, under the ISBN 978-1847199201. (My thanks to the publisher for a review copy of the book.) On the publisher's page, visitors will find detailed information about the book, a table of contents, a sample chapter in PDF format (Chapter 9, "User Interface Enhancement Techniques"), errata (only three reported as of this writing), and links to purchase either the print or electronic versions of the book, or both at a large discount. The authors of this title, George Papadongonas and Yiannis Doxaras, are experienced open-source developers. They both reside in Greece, which may explain why the reader will stumble upon — and sometimes over — many oddly-formed phrases throughout the book, as though they had been written in a foreign language initially, and then translated into English. More on that later. Nonetheless, almost all of the material presented within the 364 pages can be clearly understood by anyone who is comfortable with the basic terminology of e-commerce and Drupal. The authors have their own website for the book, yet oddly it isn't mentioned anywhere in the text.

The book is organized into ten chapters and three appendices. The first chapter is a brief introduction to Drupal, Ubercart, and the test case used in the early chapters — in this case, a store selling electronics online. Chapter 2 explains how to install the minimum required Web technologies, Drupal, Ubercart, and related contrib modules — either individually or using packages such as XAMPP for the Web server and the UberDrupal installation profile for Ubercart. The authors recommend the use of the Thickbox module for lightbox functionality, but that one has since been superseded by the Colorbox module. The reader is told that the extra modules listed on pages 34-35 do not need to be installed immediately, but will be installed in each chapter as required; but this is misleading, because in later chapters the readers will discover repeatedly that they were not told when to install the modules. Readers may be puzzled as to whether or not they are expected by the authors to use UberDrupal, but it is of no consequence, because the end result is the same, namely, the Ubercart site is ready for configuration.

The third chapter covers basic configuration of both Drupal and Ubercart, and begins with a thorough introduction to the admin area of Drupal. Experienced Drupal users could skip most of the first three chapters — aside from the list of needed contrib modules on pages 31 and 32. In the brief section on downloading and installing Ubercart, the authors advise the reader to enable the core modules, but unfortunately provide no guidance on any of the optional ones that should be enabled so the reader can easily follow the test case in the book. The reference on page 48 to "path/x" (where x is a node identifier) is perplexing, because the authors fail to explain what they mean by 'path', since its literal use is invalid, and no directory path is presented. Also, they state that the default Drupal temporary directory (/tmp) does not need to be changed, but that is not true for Windows users who want to use an existing directory, such as C:\DOCUME~1\[username]\LOCALS~1\Temp (where [username] is their current Windows username). The cart settings on page 55 show four panes, instead of the two that will be seen by readers who have followed the authors' instructions exactly up to this point. A similar problem is encountered on page 65, because the text assumes that the reader has enabled product kits, although Chapter 2 recommended otherwise. The "Product features" pane is skipped, without any apparent reason. In general, the authors' coverage of the configuration settings provide little information beyond what is already explained on the settings forms themselves; this chapter would have been much more beneficial had the authors explored the typical cases in which the reader would want to change the settings, and the benefits of doing so.

The material becomes more interesting with Chapter 4, which gets into the details of managing categories, subcategories, products, and attributes. The authors begin by showing how to enhance products using both admin-created and user-generated tags for products and product kits. Yet in describing the latter type, a critical step in the process is neglected, namely, enabling the "Tags" setting. The reader is then told to create a couple sample products, and combine them into a product kit, which is a straightforward process in Ubercart — although some readers may initially be puzzled by the instructions to go to a Web page on the site http://www.mysite.com/ (also on page 106). More odd is the example product kit having a name of just a single component and a description consisting only of the other component's name. Readers learn how to bulk import a large amount of product data. In the process, we are instructed to "enable this module" (page 89), when actually all three modules need to be enabled. Also, no reason is given as to why the authors opted for the directory name "import" over the module's better default of "imports." The second figure on page 97 shows the first imported record not as a formatted product entry, but as PHP code, which is probably not what was intended. The next topic — product attributes — is important, because any shopping cart system that lacks flexible and powerful attribute management capabilities may appear at first glance to be a workable choice for creating an online store, but eventually those deficiencies will make it difficult if not impossible to implement the e-commerce setup desired by the store owner. The chapter is wrapped up with a brief but valuable description of the three ways to manage the products in an Ubercart site.

When it comes to shipping and packaging — the focus of Chapter 5 — far too many shopping cart systems burden the store admin with limited options and non-intuitive interfaces. Ubercart is relatively more straightforward, and the book shows how to specify destination countries, conditional actions, and shipping quotes — using flat rates, product weight, UPS, and USPS. Unfortunately, conditional actions are given little attention, and even the sample scenario is not demonstrated. This is a shame, because the topic is critical to developing an Ubercart-based store so it will automatically perform actions — such as notifying the customer — based upon a wide range of common events and conditions. Anyone planning on using the UPS shipping method should note that the registration URL provided has changed since publication of the book, but does point to the UPS Developer Kit, which has a registration link and other resources. The last section, on weight quotes, could prove baffling, because it does not match the current behavior of Ubercart in defining such a shipping method.

Properly calculating the appropriate taxes for customer orders, and accepting payments online, are two areas of e-commerce fraught with potential problems, and even greater legal risks. These are explored in the sixth chapter, which gets off to a shaky start with the claim that the overview page for "Tax rates and settings" has policies already configured, when in fact there are none. Readers learn about tax rates within Ubercart, payment workflow options, advantages and disadvantages of accepting credit cards on one's site, the configuration of payment settings, and details on the Ubercart modules available for the major gateway services — with an emphasis upon PayPal and Google Checkout. Oddly, the authors recommend that merchants outside of the United States and UK obtain VAT numbers, even though the former country does not have a value-added tax (at least, not yet). The chapter concludes with a brief overview of how to create your own payment gateway module. The authors mention that they are providing the reader with code samples for two of the most common payment gateway request methods, and yet there is no such code in the chapter, and the book has no downloadable code on the Packt Publishing website.

Chapter 7 looks at the related topics of customer management; order tracking, workflow, search, creation, and modification; and invoicing, payments, packaging, and shipping. Merchants will find much of this information collected into the reports built into Ubercart. Yet more thought should have been put into the diagrams, such as the one on page 160, which includes an unexplained asterisk in one status box, and an order going from the status of "product gathering" to a second status with the identical name. Also, the process of creating a new order as described does not match the current interface in Ubercart 2.4 (the current version as of this writing). The chapter continues with summaries of customer relationship management (CRM) in general, and CiviCRM in particular, and how it can be integrated into an Ubercart site. The authors state that the Ubercart Wish List module is part of the Ubercart "extra" list of submodules, but it is instead a separate project. Other methods of increasing sales are discussed, including newsletters, company blogs, discussion forums, and Twitter.

In some respects, the remaining three chapters can be thought of as a second part of the book, because they presume that you have completed all of the elementary components of your online store, and are now ready to customize its appearance, and begin marketing the site. Chapter 8 elucidates how to find, install, and modify a Drupal theme for your needs — as well as how to create your own, based upon the popular Zen and Fusion starter themes. The material is generally clear, except for the authors' claims that site visitors cannot "perform proper searches" using the default Drupal 6 theme (Garland), and that you the site creator "cannot interfere with UI" (whatever that means). Confusingly, pages 200 and 201 list all sorts of advanced theme configuration settings for Garland which don't exist. The chapter finishes with a demonstration of how to create a new Drupal theme from either a static HTML site or a Photoshop template (despite an earlier claim that the chapter would end with a reference to the Fusion Theming System, which is absent).

Chapter 9, "User Interface Enhancement Techniques," shows you how to improve an Ubercart-based site using taxonomies and recommendation systems (for product cross-selling), the Panels and Views modules (for greater flexibility in information display), discounts, and other techniques. This discussion has more wheat than chaff versus the earlier chapters, probably because the authors are exploring higher-level methods, and not stepping the reader through forms. But again, configuration settings are mentioned that will not be seen by the reader, evidently because the authors do not provide timely instructions as to the modules to install and enable, such as XML Sitemap (page 231).

The final chapter first explores a host of Drupal contrib modules aimed at online promotion, and then shows how to improve a site's security with backups, security reviews, and spam blocking. The final material comprises three appendices, covering a hotel booking system, lists of the modules used in the book, and some of the free and paid themes suitable for an Ubercart site.

The book contains numerous errata: "contributed systems" (page 1; should read "contributed modules"), "innovated" (page 7; should read "innovative"), "constrains" (page 7; should read "constraints"), "hundreds and thousands" (page 8; should read "hundreds of thousands"), "It is [a] social media ready" (page 8), "brooking" (page 10), "flash animated" (page 10; should read "Flash-animated"), "depreciated" (page 20; should read "deprecated"), "[the] Drupal installer" (page 27 twice, and 28), "[the] time zone" (30), "their home page[s]" (32), "to [the] site" (48), "such [a] service" (58), "customer [to] enter" (65), "ipod" (80), ."com//node" (86), "types or files" (88; should read "types of files"), "know, exactly" (106), "it it" (111), ", [the] shipping rate" (112), "charge[s] you" (128), "customers['] geographic locations" (132), "statements[,] discussed" (134), "logics" (134). That last one — an amusing non-word — seemed a "logical" and thus appropriate place to stop recording errata, even though I had yet to reach the halfway point in the book.

Earlier I noted that many of the phrases — and entire sentences — are awkwardly constructed. A few of them are unintentionally humorous, such as the phrase "to mess with" getting turned into "to mess up with" (page 205), and the phrase "a check for the balance" getting shredded into "a balanced check" (page 147) — which immediately brings to mind the question, What would be an unbalanced check? This problem worsens as the book progresses; by page 244, "caching time" has been shortchanged into "cashing time," and "number-one ally" has melted into "number-one alloy" (page 292). Some of the problems are present in all the chapters. For example, in countless places, the words "the" and "a" are needed but missing. While programming books generally are known for being grammatically and stylistically weak, there is no excuse for releasing a book to press that has not been thoroughly proofread. The same is true with regards to the technical editing of such a volume prior to publication. Throughout the book, URLs are missing the root directory "/" (which generates an error from the server). In most if not all places where the reader is told to leave a page's settings unchanged, he is then told to click the "Save configuration" button (before going on to the next page) — which is completely unnecessary and a waste of time.

But these are not the flaws of greatest importance. There is too much emphasis throughout this book on how to fill out form fields that are fairly obvious, and yet the most important subject matter is oftentimes glossed over. For instance, the topic of conditional actions arguably deserves its own chapter, or at least an extended section — not one and a half pages up front, and then several paragraphs later. A few key e-commerce topics are absent. A glaring example of this is the lack of discussion of how to sell digital products in one's store, which nowadays is important enough to warrant its own chapter. Subscription services (typically with recurring payments) is another worthy topic completely skipped. These deficiencies may be due to the authors' focus on explaining the admin pages and settings found within the basic Ubercart modules, rather than a much more pragmatic approach of exploring the steps needed to reach a goal (e.g., selling downloadable files) regardless of what modules are utilized. Admittedly, Ubercart and all of its constituent modules comprise enough details and moving parts that could justify a book of greater length. Yet room could have been made for those details and advanced topics by spending less time describing (obvious) form fields. Lastly, if the authors had expected the reader to be able to follow their instructions throughout the book, they should have made it more clear as to which modules and options should be enabled at each step.

Nonetheless, the authors have clearly put a lot of effort into making what could be an extremely dry subject more approachable, as they take the reader through the major phases of building a typical online store for selling physical goods. Offering complete explanations and plenty of screenshots, this book could be a valuable resource — as both tutorial and reference — for Web designers, developers, business owners, and anyone else involved in creating a Drupal/Ubercart e-commerce website.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer.

You can purchase Drupal e-commerce with Ubercart 2.x from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Like all major programming languages, JavaScript can be extended in functionality through the use of libraries, such as jQuery, which is currently seeing tremendous popularity and enhancement in the Web development community. Designers and developers who want to learn how to use jQuery for creating rich user interfaces through client-side JavaScript are advised to begin their journey to jQuery proficiency by reading one of the many books dedicated to this powerful JavaScript resource — such as jQuery Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for jQuery Developers." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. jQuery Cookbook author Various authors pages 480 pages publisher O'Reilly Media rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0596159771 summary An extensive collection of solutions to jQuery problems. This book was published by O'Reilly Media on 19 November 2009, under the ISBN 978-0596159771, and is authored by no fewer than 19 contributors — all quite knowledgeable of JavaScript and jQuery — and edited by one of those contributors, Cody Lindley. On the publisher's page for the book, visitors can read the book's description, table of contents, and errata, of which there are 22 as of this writing, although none have been confirmed by the authors or publisher. Visitors can also download all of the sample code used in the book, in addition to the eight code demos for Chapter 13. Lastly, prospective buyers can purchase the print version of the book, the electronic one (in PDF, ePub, and Mobi format), or the two combined at a considerable discount — or read the book as part of Safari Books Online.

jQuery Cookbook's 480 pages are organized into 18 chapters, covering a wide range of topics: the basics, element selection, utilities, dimensions, effects, events, forms, plug-ins, user interfaces, theming, Ajax, data formats, and testing. Lindley starts off the first chapter, titled "jQuery Basics," by presenting the advantages, philosophy, and organization of jQuery. Readers will likely chuckle at his suggestion that they memorize the jQuery API outline, which comprises two pages. The many code snippets are quite helpful, but they are needlessly long, partly because most of them contain far more HTML elements than are needed to illustrate the point, and also because each snippet contains the DOCTYPE and head tags, among others — often taking up more lines on the page than does the code pertinent to the topic at hand. This pointless and space-wasting redundancy is seen also in a few of the chapters that follow. As well, some of the passages in the first chapter's narrative are oddly phrased, frequently requiring a rereading of the material, while others could be made more concise. Additionally, some of the sample code contains bugs, which fortunately are detailed on the errata page mentioned earlier. The second chapter, "Selecting Elements with jQuery," presents numerous techniques for specifying elements within the DOM. The only obvious blemish in the material is in section 2.4, where the author refers to animated elements, but with absolutely no explanation as to what that means; countless new readers may assume he is referring to animated GIFs. Nonetheless, these two chapters form a helpful foundation for the rest of the manuscript.

The third chapter, "Beyond the Basics," gets off to a questionable start with the assertion that "jQuery can [] extend jQuery to infinite possibilities," which sounds like a line wisely rejected for the movie Toy Story. Yet the discussion continues on a solid footing, as it covers more advanced techniques for working with selected elements. Some of the discussion overlaps material presented in the previous two chapters, but it is always worthwhile to hear critical concepts explained from a different perspective. However, section 3.8, which briefly introduces jQuery plug-ins, is out of place; that material should be folded into Chapter 12, which focuses on that topic. The fourth chapter may be brief, but it explains several jQuery utility methods. Most of the code snippets use a format of "(function($) (jQuery);" — whose usage and advantages are not explained in this chapter, nor any earlier ones. This points up one of the key downsides of having almost every chapter of a programming book written by separate authors: readers can be confused or misled by disparities in coding practices, especially when the reasoning behind them is not given. The title of the fifth chapter, "Faster, Simpler, More Fun," is a bit misleading, because the authors don't explain how to make one's jQuery programming simpler or more fun, but they do provide a great deal of information on troubleshooting, performance optimization, and jQuery coding practices, including those pertaining to progressive enhancement, accessibility, and unobtrusiveness. Section 5.19 lacks a figure showing the menu being discussed, but that's the only obvious flaw.

The remaining chapters are dedicated to more specific aspects of jQuery programming, including the important topics of page layout as well as element positioning and sizing, discussed in Chapter 6. The subsequent chapter delves into effects, which is one of the more exciting topics in the jQuery realm. Even though a portion of the readers may be put off by the trickiness of the code, the material does demonstrate some of the powerful capabilities of jQuery effects — which in conjunction with HTML5 may easily encroach on areas of client-side programming formerly dominated by Adobe Flash. Throughout Chapter 7, most if not all places where the author refers to the "mouse," he apparently means the "mouse pointer." Events play a critical role in JavaScript software, and even more so for code that is mostly jQuery — thus the value of chapters 8 and 9, which examine basic and advanced event handling. The next pair of chapters discuss a variety of techniques for enhancing HTML forms, from scratch and through the use of jQuery plug-ins. The sample source code is better commented than what is seen elsewhere in the book, and the explanations are quite good. The subsequent chapter focuses on jQuery plug-ins, beyond their usage within HTML forms, and briefly explains how to create your own plug-ins and how to perform unit testing on them.

Because JavaScript is primarily a client-side technology, it should come as no surprise that jQuery can prove an outstanding tool in crafting user interfaces for Web sites and Web-based applications. Chapters 13 through 15 explore such topics as drop-down menus, sliding panels, rotating images, modal windows, tooltips, the jQuery UI, and how to style jQuery UI widgets, a.k.a., theming. No Web interface is an island, and over the years there have emerged a number of data formats and protocols for utilizing those formats for transmitting information between browsers and servers — such as Ajax, XML, JSON, and JSONP — covered in Chapter 16. Finally, the last two chapters of the book are geared more to testing and deployment, and less so to interface design and development. The topics covered include techniques for persisting data in the browser, managing large amounts of code and data for major software projects, automating the unit testing of jQuery code, testing callbacks and user actions, grouping and selecting tests, and more.

Overall, jQuery Cookbook starts off with some basics, and only then moves on to higher-level concepts and related use cases. However, the book is ostensibly aimed at beginners and intermediate JavaScript programmers, but the former group may find the ideas difficult to grasp fully, despite the introductory chapters — because some of the techniques are fairly advanced, they involve terminology unfamiliar to anyone new to jQuery, and some of that terminology is not explained. On the other hand, the recipes are generally well written and clear, supplemented with properly tested and working code. Consequently, anyone who takes the time to work through the examples patiently, should be well rewarded.

Because of its coverage of a wide range of topics, jQuery Cookbook can be used not only as a learning aid, but in some respects also as a reference — and in this regard the book's index will be quite useful. In light of the considerable length of the manuscript, reading it from stem to stern would involve an investment of time — especially if one were to work through all of the examples and try them out in one's own development environment — quite easily, in fact, since all of it can be downloaded from the publisher's site. Most of it, however, is organized as plain text files, and not HTML files; and no reason is provided for this annoying choice.

In terms of the layout and appearance of the text and figures, one flaw is that in countless lines throughout the book, the words are jammed together, making it difficult to read the text rapidly. In fact, some of these lines almost look like single words. This is also seen in the subheads, an excellent example of which can be found on page 149: "Solution2:ChangingthehrefAttributeoftheStylesheetThat'sResponsible." Unfortunately, the same is true for much of the source code, but in a different sense: Operators and variables are jammed together, clearly illustrating the need for whitespace in making code more readable. Some of the code is excessively long (noted earlier), and the authors are inconsistent as to whether their JavaScript is placed at the end of the body element or in the header element. Nonetheless, the sample code is generally of good quality.

There is another aspect related to not only this book but all other computer programming books for which individual chapters are written by different authors: jQuery Cookbook does not seem to be a single book, but instead a collection of books that were bundled together because of a common thread, namely, jQuery. This leads to some of the problems mentioned earlier, such as discrepancies in coding techniques and formatting — from which the beginning reader is supposedly learning best practices. On the other hand, the multi-author approach makes it possible for each major subject area to be handled by one or more writers who are expert in that particular area — which in turn results in a better product overall, even if one or two of the chapters are noticeably weaker than the others.

The book contains a number of copyediting flaws not listed on the aforementioned errata page: "elevated" should instead read "alleviated" (page 12); "or [its] alias" (13); "could change" should read "could be changed" (26); "jQuery('a')removeAttr('title')" is missing a "." (30); "'blue')" is missing a terminating ";" (50); "season in" should read "season" (56); "was contained" should read "is contained" (144); "position: absolute" in the narrative should not be broken between two lines (156); "great[er] than" (157); "equal[-]sized panels" (160); "only running" should read "only runs" (165); "still support[s]" (168), "#source5txt" should read "#source4txt" (217); and at this point I stopped recording errata. Also, in countless places in most of the chapters, semicolons are used where dashes are called for, and vice versa. O'Reilly's copyeditors should have detected and fixed those errors prior to publication.

Yet most of these blemishes are of little significance. What really counts is the overall value provided to the reader: Usable for both learning and reference, jQuery Cookbook delivers a tasty buffet of programming essentials, best practices, illustrative examples, optimization tips, and other information of value to JavaScript developers who wish to spice up their Web creations with jQuery.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer.

You can purchase jQuery Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for jQuery Developers from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Like all major programming languages, JavaScript can be extended in functionality through the use of libraries, such as jQuery, which is currently seeing tremendous popularity and enhancement in the Web development community. Designers and developers who want to learn how to use jQuery for creating rich user interfaces through client-side JavaScript are advised to begin their journey to jQuery proficiency by reading one of the many books dedicated to this powerful JavaScript resource — such as jQuery Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for jQuery Developers." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. jQuery Cookbook author Various authors pages 480 pages publisher O'Reilly Media rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0596159771 summary An extensive collection of solutions to jQuery problems. This book was published by O'Reilly Media on 19 November 2009, under the ISBN 978-0596159771, and is authored by no fewer than 19 contributors — all quite knowledgeable of JavaScript and jQuery — and edited by one of those contributors, Cody Lindley. On the publisher's page for the book, visitors can read the book's description, table of contents, and errata, of which there are 22 as of this writing, although none have been confirmed by the authors or publisher. Visitors can also download all of the sample code used in the book, in addition to the eight code demos for Chapter 13. Lastly, prospective buyers can purchase the print version of the book, the electronic one (in PDF, ePub, and Mobi format), or the two combined at a considerable discount — or read the book as part of Safari Books Online.

jQuery Cookbook's 480 pages are organized into 18 chapters, covering a wide range of topics: the basics, element selection, utilities, dimensions, effects, events, forms, plug-ins, user interfaces, theming, Ajax, data formats, and testing. Lindley starts off the first chapter, titled "jQuery Basics," by presenting the advantages, philosophy, and organization of jQuery. Readers will likely chuckle at his suggestion that they memorize the jQuery API outline, which comprises two pages. The many code snippets are quite helpful, but they are needlessly long, partly because most of them contain far more HTML elements than are needed to illustrate the point, and also because each snippet contains the DOCTYPE and head tags, among others — often taking up more lines on the page than does the code pertinent to the topic at hand. This pointless and space-wasting redundancy is seen also in a few of the chapters that follow. As well, some of the passages in the first chapter's narrative are oddly phrased, frequently requiring a rereading of the material, while others could be made more concise. Additionally, some of the sample code contains bugs, which fortunately are detailed on the errata page mentioned earlier. The second chapter, "Selecting Elements with jQuery," presents numerous techniques for specifying elements within the DOM. The only obvious blemish in the material is in section 2.4, where the author refers to animated elements, but with absolutely no explanation as to what that means; countless new readers may assume he is referring to animated GIFs. Nonetheless, these two chapters form a helpful foundation for the rest of the manuscript.

The third chapter, "Beyond the Basics," gets off to a questionable start with the assertion that "jQuery can [] extend jQuery to infinite possibilities," which sounds like a line wisely rejected for the movie Toy Story. Yet the discussion continues on a solid footing, as it covers more advanced techniques for working with selected elements. Some of the discussion overlaps material presented in the previous two chapters, but it is always worthwhile to hear critical concepts explained from a different perspective. However, section 3.8, which briefly introduces jQuery plug-ins, is out of place; that material should be folded into Chapter 12, which focuses on that topic. The fourth chapter may be brief, but it explains several jQuery utility methods. Most of the code snippets use a format of "(function($) (jQuery);" — whose usage and advantages are not explained in this chapter, nor any earlier ones. This points up one of the key downsides of having almost every chapter of a programming book written by separate authors: readers can be confused or misled by disparities in coding practices, especially when the reasoning behind them is not given. The title of the fifth chapter, "Faster, Simpler, More Fun," is a bit misleading, because the authors don't explain how to make one's jQuery programming simpler or more fun, but they do provide a great deal of information on troubleshooting, performance optimization, and jQuery coding practices, including those pertaining to progressive enhancement, accessibility, and unobtrusiveness. Section 5.19 lacks a figure showing the menu being discussed, but that's the only obvious flaw.

The remaining chapters are dedicated to more specific aspects of jQuery programming, including the important topics of page layout as well as element positioning and sizing, discussed in Chapter 6. The subsequent chapter delves into effects, which is one of the more exciting topics in the jQuery realm. Even though a portion of the readers may be put off by the trickiness of the code, the material does demonstrate some of the powerful capabilities of jQuery effects — which in conjunction with HTML5 may easily encroach on areas of client-side programming formerly dominated by Adobe Flash. Throughout Chapter 7, most if not all places where the author refers to the "mouse," he apparently means the "mouse pointer." Events play a critical role in JavaScript software, and even more so for code that is mostly jQuery — thus the value of chapters 8 and 9, which examine basic and advanced event handling. The next pair of chapters discuss a variety of techniques for enhancing HTML forms, from scratch and through the use of jQuery plug-ins. The sample source code is better commented than what is seen elsewhere in the book, and the explanations are quite good. The subsequent chapter focuses on jQuery plug-ins, beyond their usage within HTML forms, and briefly explains how to create your own plug-ins and how to perform unit testing on them.

Because JavaScript is primarily a client-side technology, it should come as no surprise that jQuery can prove an outstanding tool in crafting user interfaces for Web sites and Web-based applications. Chapters 13 through 15 explore such topics as drop-down menus, sliding panels, rotating images, modal windows, tooltips, the jQuery UI, and how to style jQuery UI widgets, a.k.a., theming. No Web interface is an island, and over the years there have emerged a number of data formats and protocols for utilizing those formats for transmitting information between browsers and servers — such as Ajax, XML, JSON, and JSONP — covered in Chapter 16. Finally, the last two chapters of the book are geared more to testing and deployment, and less so to interface design and development. The topics covered include techniques for persisting data in the browser, managing large amounts of code and data for major software projects, automating the unit testing of jQuery code, testing callbacks and user actions, grouping and selecting tests, and more.

Overall, jQuery Cookbook starts off with some basics, and only then moves on to higher-level concepts and related use cases. However, the book is ostensibly aimed at beginners and intermediate JavaScript programmers, but the former group may find the ideas difficult to grasp fully, despite the introductory chapters — because some of the techniques are fairly advanced, they involve terminology unfamiliar to anyone new to jQuery, and some of that terminology is not explained. On the other hand, the recipes are generally well written and clear, supplemented with properly tested and working code. Consequently, anyone who takes the time to work through the examples patiently, should be well rewarded.

Because of its coverage of a wide range of topics, jQuery Cookbook can be used not only as a learning aid, but in some respects also as a reference — and in this regard the book's index will be quite useful. In light of the considerable length of the manuscript, reading it from stem to stern would involve an investment of time — especially if one were to work through all of the examples and try them out in one's own development environment — quite easily, in fact, since all of it can be downloaded from the publisher's site. Most of it, however, is organized as plain text files, and not HTML files; and no reason is provided for this annoying choice.

In terms of the layout and appearance of the text and figures, one flaw is that in countless lines throughout the book, the words are jammed together, making it difficult to read the text rapidly. In fact, some of these lines almost look like single words. This is also seen in the subheads, an excellent example of which can be found on page 149: "Solution2:ChangingthehrefAttributeoftheStylesheetThat'sResponsible." Unfortunately, the same is true for much of the source code, but in a different sense: Operators and variables are jammed together, clearly illustrating the need for whitespace in making code more readable. Some of the code is excessively long (noted earlier), and the authors are inconsistent as to whether their JavaScript is placed at the end of the body element or in the header element. Nonetheless, the sample code is generally of good quality.

There is another aspect related to not only this book but all other computer programming books for which individual chapters are written by different authors: jQuery Cookbook does not seem to be a single book, but instead a collection of books that were bundled together because of a common thread, namely, jQuery. This leads to some of the problems mentioned earlier, such as discrepancies in coding techniques and formatting — from which the beginning reader is supposedly learning best practices. On the other hand, the multi-author approach makes it possible for each major subject area to be handled by one or more writers who are expert in that particular area — which in turn results in a better product overall, even if one or two of the chapters are noticeably weaker than the others.

The book contains a number of copyediting flaws not listed on the aforementioned errata page: "elevated" should instead read "alleviated" (page 12); "or [its] alias" (13); "could change" should read "could be changed" (26); "jQuery('a')removeAttr('title')" is missing a "." (30); "'blue')" is missing a terminating ";" (50); "season in" should read "season" (56); "was contained" should read "is contained" (144); "position: absolute" in the narrative should not be broken between two lines (156); "great[er] than" (157); "equal[-]sized panels" (160); "only running" should read "only runs" (165); "still support[s]" (168), "#source5txt" should read "#source4txt" (217); and at this point I stopped recording errata. Also, in countless places in most of the chapters, semicolons are used where dashes are called for, and vice versa. O'Reilly's copyeditors should have detected and fixed those errors prior to publication.

Yet most of these blemishes are of little significance. What really counts is the overall value provided to the reader: Usable for both learning and reference, jQuery Cookbook delivers a tasty buffet of programming essentials, best practices, illustrative examples, optimization tips, and other information of value to JavaScript developers who wish to spice up their Web creations with jQuery.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer.

You can purchase jQuery Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for jQuery Developers from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the online resources devoted to assisting Web designers and developers, Smashing Magazine is one of the most highly regarded, primarily because of the depth and consistent quality of the articles that appear on its website. This apparently motivated many of its readers to encourage the magazine's editors to develop and release a book on Web design, which the company did in 2009, appropriately titled The Smashing Book." Read below for Michael's review. The Smashing Book author Various authors pages 311 publisher Smashing Media GmbH rating 6/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN None summary A visually rich compilation of advice from Web design experts The publication company, Smashing Media GmbH, chose to exclusively handle all aspects of the book's production, including its distribution — a unique approach that distinguishes The Smashing Book from the other technical books that most Web professionals are accustomed to reading. Because of the widely disparate results by the publisher in each aspect of this book's production — content, presentation, and distribution — it would be best to evaluate each aspect individually.

The bulk of the book's content is organized into ten chapters, each written by a different author or group of authors, and each covering some of the key areas of website design, especially for commercial sites: user interfaces, CSS-based layouts, typography, usability, color usage, performance optimization, sales conversions, and site branding. In addition, there are two chapters featuring interviews with design experts, and a summary of the company's history. The two main editors at Smashing Magazine — Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman — provide a brief preface. At the other end of the book, one finds a page devoted to the thirteen authors — a page that cleverly and concisely conveys some personal information about each person, from a statistical perspective. This is followed by an index that does not even fill a single page, possibly because it is set in a font size that is just small enough to make the entries somewhat difficult to read. Even more annoying is that every entry is presented in all lowercase, making it more difficult to locate proper names.

The book's first chapter is titled "User Interface Design in Modern Web Applications," and it discusses the basic characteristics and building blocks of an effective user interface. Its pithy advice on optimizing forms is particularly valuable. The only portion of the material that is unclear is the reference to "Ballpark" in the caption of the second figure on page 15. The second chapter, "The Art and Science of CSS-Layouts," first compares the advantages and disadvantages of fixed versus flexible layouts, and then explains how to create fluid grid layouts and adaptive fluid layouts — two topics rarely discussed in Web design books. Lastly, elastic and hybrid layouts are considered. Chapter 3 is titled "Web Typography: Rules, Guidelines and Common Mistakes" (but the Table of Contents has it wrong). Its authors present the basics of Web typography, its historical context, basic terminology, font size units, white space, typographic grids, size hierarchy, scales, paragraph styling, CSS fonts, text replacement techniques, and more. It is a particularly wide-ranging and information-packed chapter, marred only by the authors equating the Golden Ratio with the Fibonacci Sequence (page 80); they are related, but not synonymous. The next chapter, "Usability Principles for Modern Websites" explains the basics of how to optimize sites for the behavior of the typical Internet user. Despite its ridiculously hyperbolic title, "The Ultimate Guide to Fantastic Color Usage in Web Design, Usability and Experience" does present some examples of effective color use.

Roughly halfway through the book, it shifts focus from design considerations to the performance of a site — both technical and commercial. In "Performance Optimization for Websites," many of the techniques advised are unusable for most websites, since their Web hosting services do not allow SSH access and modification of the Apache, PHP, or MySQL settings. Also, the reader does not need to be told repeatedly that faster page loading leads to a better user experience — especially at least eight times. The next chapter, titled "Design to Sell — Increasing Conversion Rates" explains key concepts of online selling, as well as the applicability of sales knowledge gleaned long before there was an Internet. Aside from misstating how to calculate a conversion rate, the selling methods presented are excellent, and illustrated with real-world examples. A key component of online marketing is one's brand, the topic of the eighth chapter, "How to Turn a Site into a Remarkable Brand," which also makes heavy use of illustrative examples. The last two chapters are rather unique. The first one, "Learning from Experts — Interviews and Insights," consists of Q&A with half a dozen Web designers, and encompasses some terrific insights from industry veterans. The final chapter, "Behind the Curtains: The Smashing Magazine Story," presents a (sometimes tedious) history of the publication and its defining principles.

The content of the book is generally good, with some chapters offering far more value than others — which naturally varies according to what type of information the reader is most interested in. The formatting of the text could be improved in future editions. The CSS, JavaScript, and PHP code is double-spaced, which is unnecessary and actually makes it less readable, not more. Each chapter contains at least a few pullouts, which are of no value, because the text is already broken up visually with color images, headings and subheadings (of a different color than the regular text), and the occasional code snippet.

Many of the references in the book can be found at A Smashing List of Links, which could be made less frustrating by ordering the chapters' sections to match the order of the chapters in the book. At the bottom of the homepage, one will find a list of the authors, linked to their websites, as well as a list of errata. Strangely, the first erratum refers to errors in the book's introduction, even though the book does not have an introduction. Those errors are in the Table of Contents. That's not the only erratum in the errata: The erratum for page 38 is stated twice. The erratum for page 40 claims that the Clearleft slogan takes one line at a width of 1280 pixels, when actually it is split into two lines, as stated in the text and demonstrated in the screenshot in the book. At the bottom of the links page, it reads "an 404-page." Also, the errata would be much more helpful to the reader if they were sorted by page number. (All of these mistakes exist at the time of the writing of this review, and may have been corrected by the time you read this.)

There are additional errata not listed on that links page: "a #content-block" should read "a content block" (pages 38 and 39); "a JavaScript that" should read "JavaScript code that" (page 49); the three quotation marks (there should be four) near the end of the first paragraph on page 60, should be removed or fixed; the last sentence in the second paragraph on page 64, needs a verb; "users['] ability" (page 73); "using [it] when" (page 80); "see [the] screenshot" (page 86); "cave at" (page 89); page 91 has two footnote 11 superscripts, and the first one's URL is missing; "grab [the] user's" (page 115); "track on" should read "track of" (page 116); "
" should read "…" (pages 117 and 118); "[do] not always" (page 137, section 11); "of interest[s]" (page 143); "an disorganized" (page 145); "shopping basket" is missing a closing quotation mark (page 146); "based [on] words" (page 147); "pound sign sign" (page 157); "CoLd" (page 171); "a indicator" (page 195); "in [the] future" (pages 203, 307, and 309); "might [be] a" (page 212); "one give[s]" (page 222); the phrase "at a website promotes" on page 239, is completely extraneous; "flash" (page 258); and "planing" (page 276).

As for the production of the book, there are certainly some positive and negative qualities. The entire book is glossy, full-color, and quite attractive. But there are disadvantages to such glossy pages, including the glare on the pages from one's light source; plus, the book is rather heavy relative to its diminutive size, because the pages are quite thick. Even though the book consists of over 300 pages, they are small in size (14 by 21 cm), and thus contain less material than that found in the average computer book. Also, the short length of each line has induced the typesetters to jam the words closer together, making it nearly impossible to read each line at a fast pace. Incidentally, the copy that I received had an outside spine that at first appeared to be damaged by razor cuts, which instead turned out to be thin threads of glue (which were not difficult to remove).

The book is packaged so as to provide a lot more protection than one finds from the well-known online booksellers. The book is encased in shrink wrap plastic, and housed inside a tight-fitting cardboard box (which turned out to be rather difficult to open without tearing it apart). Yet my primary complaint is a combination of several problems: The small and heavy pages are obvious candidates for metal ring binding, which would allow the reader to open the book completely with ease. But instead, the publisher chose to use a glue binding that is very tight, which makes it difficult to open the book beyond 90 degrees, and impossible to get it to lay flat (which would be quite handy when trying to implement the book's ideas in one's own code, and thus needing to use the keyboard and pointing device). Even worse, the gutter is even narrower than the outer margin, for every page, and thus much of the text disappears into the gap. This compels the reader to pull the book open further, which quickly damages the spine, and eventually causes the pages to become detached, as evidenced in descriptions and even pictures posted by unhappy buyers. As for myself, in reading the book from cover to cover, it is now the only book in my library held together with a rubber band.

Smashing Media GmbH sells the book directly from its website, for $29.90 or €23.90 per copy. The company elected to self-publish the book, and without an ISBN number. Consequently, none of the major online booksellers in the United States make the book available. Prospective buyers anywhere in the world must order the book from the publisher, and wait for it to be shipped from Freiburg, Germany. This poses a serious problem, aside from the delay. Notably, an untold number of orders are never received by the buyers — reflected in the endless complaints on a page announcing the book's release. The shipping problems would have been avoided for US and UK buyers had the publisher listed the book with Amazon.com and/or Barnes & Noble. Offering the book in electronic format would have completely avoided all of these shipping problems, but that is not an option now nor one planned for the future.

If my experience is anything to go on, then your purchase order could turn into a fiasco. One full month after I was told that the book would be shipped to me, it still had not arrived. So the editor-in-chief kindly asked the customer support department to contact me, but they didn't. They told him that the book had been shipped, but when I asked repeatedly for the tracking number, it was not provided. I later figured out why: Typically no tracking number is used, so neither you nor the publisher will likely know where the book is in the shipping process! It should have been obvious as to the problems that this would have caused, especially for overseas shipments. All of this is independent of the initial multi-month delay that plagued the release of the book, apparently due to production problems. Initially slated for a September 2009 release, the company began taking pre-orders, but the book did not begin shipping until December.

European residents should have no difficulties receiving the book from the publisher, and will receive their copies sent by Deutsche Post — assuming the copies are not lost in the mail. However, buyers in the United States, the UK, or anywhere else, will probably get much better results by asking local booksellers whether they can special-order a copy, or by checking online auction websites.

In terms of its content, The Smashing Book is an elegant and valuable compilation of select best practices in Web design and site optimization. In terms of production and delivery, the many problems experienced by buyers and readers can provide lessons that would benefit future efforts by the publisher.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer.

Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the online resources devoted to assisting Web designers and developers, Smashing Magazine is one of the most highly regarded, primarily because of the depth and consistent quality of the articles that appear on its website. This apparently motivated many of its readers to encourage the magazine's editors to develop and release a book on Web design, which the company did in 2009, appropriately titled The Smashing Book." Read below for Michael's review. The Smashing Book author Various authors pages 311 publisher Smashing Media GmbH rating 6/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN None summary A visually rich compilation of advice from Web design experts The publication company, Smashing Media GmbH, chose to exclusively handle all aspects of the book's production, including its distribution — a unique approach that distinguishes The Smashing Book from the other technical books that most Web professionals are accustomed to reading. Because of the widely disparate results by the publisher in each aspect of this book's production — content, presentation, and distribution — it would be best to evaluate each aspect individually.

The bulk of the book's content is organized into ten chapters, each written by a different author or group of authors, and each covering some of the key areas of website design, especially for commercial sites: user interfaces, CSS-based layouts, typography, usability, color usage, performance optimization, sales conversions, and site branding. In addition, there are two chapters featuring interviews with design experts, and a summary of the company's history. The two main editors at Smashing Magazine — Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman — provide a brief preface. At the other end of the book, one finds a page devoted to the thirteen authors — a page that cleverly and concisely conveys some personal information about each person, from a statistical perspective. This is followed by an index that does not even fill a single page, possibly because it is set in a font size that is just small enough to make the entries somewhat difficult to read. Even more annoying is that every entry is presented in all lowercase, making it more difficult to locate proper names.

The book's first chapter is titled "User Interface Design in Modern Web Applications," and it discusses the basic characteristics and building blocks of an effective user interface. Its pithy advice on optimizing forms is particularly valuable. The only portion of the material that is unclear is the reference to "Ballpark" in the caption of the second figure on page 15. The second chapter, "The Art and Science of CSS-Layouts," first compares the advantages and disadvantages of fixed versus flexible layouts, and then explains how to create fluid grid layouts and adaptive fluid layouts — two topics rarely discussed in Web design books. Lastly, elastic and hybrid layouts are considered. Chapter 3 is titled "Web Typography: Rules, Guidelines and Common Mistakes" (but the Table of Contents has it wrong). Its authors present the basics of Web typography, its historical context, basic terminology, font size units, white space, typographic grids, size hierarchy, scales, paragraph styling, CSS fonts, text replacement techniques, and more. It is a particularly wide-ranging and information-packed chapter, marred only by the authors equating the Golden Ratio with the Fibonacci Sequence (page 80); they are related, but not synonymous. The next chapter, "Usability Principles for Modern Websites" explains the basics of how to optimize sites for the behavior of the typical Internet user. Despite its ridiculously hyperbolic title, "The Ultimate Guide to Fantastic Color Usage in Web Design, Usability and Experience" does present some examples of effective color use.

Roughly halfway through the book, it shifts focus from design considerations to the performance of a site — both technical and commercial. In "Performance Optimization for Websites," many of the techniques advised are unusable for most websites, since their Web hosting services do not allow SSH access and modification of the Apache, PHP, or MySQL settings. Also, the reader does not need to be told repeatedly that faster page loading leads to a better user experience — especially at least eight times. The next chapter, titled "Design to Sell — Increasing Conversion Rates" explains key concepts of online selling, as well as the applicability of sales knowledge gleaned long before there was an Internet. Aside from misstating how to calculate a conversion rate, the selling methods presented are excellent, and illustrated with real-world examples. A key component of online marketing is one's brand, the topic of the eighth chapter, "How to Turn a Site into a Remarkable Brand," which also makes heavy use of illustrative examples. The last two chapters are rather unique. The first one, "Learning from Experts — Interviews and Insights," consists of Q&A with half a dozen Web designers, and encompasses some terrific insights from industry veterans. The final chapter, "Behind the Curtains: The Smashing Magazine Story," presents a (sometimes tedious) history of the publication and its defining principles.

The content of the book is generally good, with some chapters offering far more value than others — which naturally varies according to what type of information the reader is most interested in. The formatting of the text could be improved in future editions. The CSS, JavaScript, and PHP code is double-spaced, which is unnecessary and actually makes it less readable, not more. Each chapter contains at least a few pullouts, which are of no value, because the text is already broken up visually with color images, headings and subheadings (of a different color than the regular text), and the occasional code snippet.

Many of the references in the book can be found at A Smashing List of Links, which could be made less frustrating by ordering the chapters' sections to match the order of the chapters in the book. At the bottom of the homepage, one will find a list of the authors, linked to their websites, as well as a list of errata. Strangely, the first erratum refers to errors in the book's introduction, even though the book does not have an introduction. Those errors are in the Table of Contents. That's not the only erratum in the errata: The erratum for page 38 is stated twice. The erratum for page 40 claims that the Clearleft slogan takes one line at a width of 1280 pixels, when actually it is split into two lines, as stated in the text and demonstrated in the screenshot in the book. At the bottom of the links page, it reads "an 404-page." Also, the errata would be much more helpful to the reader if they were sorted by page number. (All of these mistakes exist at the time of the writing of this review, and may have been corrected by the time you read this.)

There are additional errata not listed on that links page: "a #content-block" should read "a content block" (pages 38 and 39); "a JavaScript that" should read "JavaScript code that" (page 49); the three quotation marks (there should be four) near the end of the first paragraph on page 60, should be removed or fixed; the last sentence in the second paragraph on page 64, needs a verb; "users['] ability" (page 73); "using [it] when" (page 80); "see [the] screenshot" (page 86); "cave at" (page 89); page 91 has two footnote 11 superscripts, and the first one's URL is missing; "grab [the] user's" (page 115); "track on" should read "track of" (page 116); "
" should read "…" (pages 117 and 118); "[do] not always" (page 137, section 11); "of interest[s]" (page 143); "an disorganized" (page 145); "shopping basket" is missing a closing quotation mark (page 146); "based [on] words" (page 147); "pound sign sign" (page 157); "CoLd" (page 171); "a indicator" (page 195); "in [the] future" (pages 203, 307, and 309); "might [be] a" (page 212); "one give[s]" (page 222); the phrase "at a website promotes" on page 239, is completely extraneous; "flash" (page 258); and "planing" (page 276).

As for the production of the book, there are certainly some positive and negative qualities. The entire book is glossy, full-color, and quite attractive. But there are disadvantages to such glossy pages, including the glare on the pages from one's light source; plus, the book is rather heavy relative to its diminutive size, because the pages are quite thick. Even though the book consists of over 300 pages, they are small in size (14 by 21 cm), and thus contain less material than that found in the average computer book. Also, the short length of each line has induced the typesetters to jam the words closer together, making it nearly impossible to read each line at a fast pace. Incidentally, the copy that I received had an outside spine that at first appeared to be damaged by razor cuts, which instead turned out to be thin threads of glue (which were not difficult to remove).

The book is packaged so as to provide a lot more protection than one finds from the well-known online booksellers. The book is encased in shrink wrap plastic, and housed inside a tight-fitting cardboard box (which turned out to be rather difficult to open without tearing it apart). Yet my primary complaint is a combination of several problems: The small and heavy pages are obvious candidates for metal ring binding, which would allow the reader to open the book completely with ease. But instead, the publisher chose to use a glue binding that is very tight, which makes it difficult to open the book beyond 90 degrees, and impossible to get it to lay flat (which would be quite handy when trying to implement the book's ideas in one's own code, and thus needing to use the keyboard and pointing device). Even worse, the gutter is even narrower than the outer margin, for every page, and thus much of the text disappears into the gap. This compels the reader to pull the book open further, which quickly damages the spine, and eventually causes the pages to become detached, as evidenced in descriptions and even pictures posted by unhappy buyers. As for myself, in reading the book from cover to cover, it is now the only book in my library held together with a rubber band.

Smashing Media GmbH sells the book directly from its website, for $29.90 or €23.90 per copy. The company elected to self-publish the book, and without an ISBN number. Consequently, none of the major online booksellers in the United States make the book available. Prospective buyers anywhere in the world must order the book from the publisher, and wait for it to be shipped from Freiburg, Germany. This poses a serious problem, aside from the delay. Notably, an untold number of orders are never received by the buyers — reflected in the endless complaints on a page announcing the book's release. The shipping problems would have been avoided for US and UK buyers had the publisher listed the book with Amazon.com and/or Barnes & Noble. Offering the book in electronic format would have completely avoided all of these shipping problems, but that is not an option now nor one planned for the future.

If my experience is anything to go on, then your purchase order could turn into a fiasco. One full month after I was told that the book would be shipped to me, it still had not arrived. So the editor-in-chief kindly asked the customer support department to contact me, but they didn't. They told him that the book had been shipped, but when I asked repeatedly for the tracking number, it was not provided. I later figured out why: Typically no tracking number is used, so neither you nor the publisher will likely know where the book is in the shipping process! It should have been obvious as to the problems that this would have caused, especially for overseas shipments. All of this is independent of the initial multi-month delay that plagued the release of the book, apparently due to production problems. Initially slated for a September 2009 release, the company began taking pre-orders, but the book did not begin shipping until December.

European residents should have no difficulties receiving the book from the publisher, and will receive their copies sent by Deutsche Post — assuming the copies are not lost in the mail. However, buyers in the United States, the UK, or anywhere else, will probably get much better results by asking local booksellers whether they can special-order a copy, or by checking online auction websites.

In terms of its content, The Smashing Book is an elegant and valuable compilation of select best practices in Web design and site optimization. In terms of production and delivery, the many problems experienced by buyers and readers can provide lessons that would benefit future efforts by the publisher.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer.

Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all Web technologies, JavaScript may have the most checkered past — first heralded as a powerful object-oriented language for jazzing up Web pages, but later condemned as a source of spammy pop-up windows and horrid animations polluting websites everywhere. Yet during the past several years, Web designers and developers are increasingly using JavaScript unobtrusively, for client-site interactivity — as a supplement to server-side functionality, not a replacement, and built upon standards-compliant (X)HTML and CSS. As a result, the once-derided language is now enjoying a true resurgence in interest and use. This has been bolstered by the proliferation of JavaScript libraries, of which jQuery is clearly the front runner. Web programmers seeking to get up to speed on this exciting resource can turn to Learning jQuery 1.3: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Learning jQuery 1.3 author Jonathan Chaffer, Karl Swedberg pages 444 pages publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1847196705 summary A detailed introduction to this popular JavaScript library. Written by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg — two veteran Web developers based in Grand Rapids, Michigan — Learning jQuery 1.3 was published on 13 February 2009, under the ISBN 978-1847196705, by Packt Publishing, which kindly provided to me a copy of the book for review. There is a publisher's Web page for the book, where readers can order print or PDF versions of the book (or both, at a sizable discount); contact Packt Publishing with questions or feedback; read more information about the book, the authors, and the table of contents; and download a free sample chapter (the fourth one, titled "Effects") in PDF format. Readers who want to follow along with the authors' discussion, should note that all of the sample code used in the book can be downloaded from its support page. There is also a link for reading the reported errata, of which there are eleven, as of this writing. (The erratum for page 40 is incorrectly listed twice.)

The book begins with a foreword by John Resig, the creator of jQuery. What follows is over 400 pages of information, organized into eleven chapters and four appendices, covering all of the major topics related to jQuery, after a quick-start chapter: selectors, events, effects, DOM manipulation, AJAX, tables, forms, shufflers and rotators, plug-ins, online resources, development tools, and closures. The book has all the ingredients to serve as a full introduction to jQuery for experienced Web programmers, because it assumes no prior knowledge of jQuery (or any other JavaScript libraries); but it does assume that the reader comprehends the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — thus not wasting time by teaching these prerequisites skills, as is attempted in some other Web programming books.

The first chapter may be brief, but it is sufficient to present the major features of jQuery, its advantages versus raw JavaScript, and a quick history of its various releases after it was first mentioned by John Resig in August 2005. In addition, the reader is shown where to obtain the library, how to add it to a Web page, and a few of its basic capabilities. In the given example, multiple HTML paragraph elements are styled using just three lines of code; yet the power of jQuery would have been demonstrated even better had the authors also shown the equivalent raw JavaScript needed to perform the same functionality.

The next four chapters present the basics of jQuery upon which everything that follows is built. Readers are introduced, in Chapter 2, to the jQuery syntax for accessing individual elements and groups of elements on a Web page, using the $() factory function, CSS selectors, and jQuery's own custom selectors. As with all of the chapters that follow, several examples are used to illustrate the core ideas. The ability to intercept and react to events on a Web page — such as a user clicking on a particular link — is an essential part of client-side interactivity, and is the topic of the third chapter. But first the groundwork is set by learning how to control when code is executed, how to utilize multiple scripts on a page, and how to use jQuery with other JavaScript libraries. Then a style switcher example is used to demonstrate the "this" keyword, shorthand event methods, and compound events, as well as event capturing, bubbling, objects, targets, propagation, delegation, namespacing, and other topics. Unfortunately, the screenshots are of little help, largely because the black-and-white images fail to show user feedback, such as green backgrounds on hover, and even bolded link text. Chapter 4, which covers jQuery effects, begins by explaining how to programmatically discover and save attribute values, for later use; then it explains how to hide and show HTML elements, fade them in and out, toggle their settings, create simple custom animations, invoke effects sequentially using queuing, and queue effects on different elements using callback functions. The fifth chapter shows how to easily add and remove elements and their attributes from the DOM, and even create a new DOM structure from scratch. Most of the sample code is well explained, except for the fourth line in the insertAfter() snippet on page 96, which is not clear at all. Also, the sample text that consumes the bulk of pages 98 and 99, should be replaced with something much shorter, partly because it would be easier to locate the "span" tags within the text. This chapter, like the previous one, concludes with a "nutshell" summary that is quite helpful — and would be even more so if it listed, next to each jQuery method, the corresponding page number.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is a combination of technologies that is seeing more widespread use every year, as developers discover the advantages of dynamic Web page interactivity without the reloading of the page each time, which of course slows down the process for the user. The sixth chapter shows how to utilize AJAX, from a jQuery perspective, with explanations and examples of the four major approaches that involve static data files, including a handy summary of when each approach would be most appropriate. Also explored are the dynamic AJAX strategies, including GET and POST requests. The authors should have mentioned that, in order to make functional the "E" and "F" dictionary entries in the example, the reader will need to load the index.html file using a Web server, and not as a static HTML file, so the calls to "e.php" and "f.php" will work. By the way, anyone confused by the reference to jQuery Reference Guide, on page 146, should be aware that it is the title of a book written by the same authors as this one.

With the seventh chapter, the authors transition from what they consider to be the tutorial portion of the book, and begin to demonstrate how the reader can utilize the earlier basics for improving Web page functionality — in this case, working with tables. The authors make good use of code snippets and screenshots to show how one can do table sorting, row striping, row highlighting, and other capabilities independent of — and in conjunction with — server-side equivalents. The subsequent chapter consists of a similar survey of jQuery goodness, but applied to forms — specifically: styling, client-side validation, auto-completion of search entry fields, and input masking (with an emphasis upon numbers). The sample HTML is a model of quality markup, except for the wrapping of checkbox input elements inside of label elements, which is noncanonical and can make it problematic to properly align all the checkboxes in a form vertically, for all browsers. Chapter 9, titled "Shufflers and Rotators," demonstrates how to create a rotator for RSS newsfeed headlines, and an image carousel featuring image enlargement with transition. Readers interested in testing out the sample code — and possibly even modifying it — should be aware that, for chapters 7 through 9, the sample code within the downloadable archive is not stored in chapter-named directories, but instead combined into an application, in the "bookstore" directory.

The last two chapters of the book are devoted to jQuery plug-ins — using those created by others, and developing one's own. In Chapter 10, to illustrate the high-level ideas, the authors focus on and recommend a number of specific plug-ins built for handling forms, advanced effects, widgets, tables, images, and charts, as well as some theming resources. In the subsequent chapter, the authors show how to develop plug-ins of varying complexity, including those that implement new global functions, implement new jQuery object methods, and extend the jQuery selector engine; the chapter wraps up with advice on how best to distribute newly-created plug-ins.

All of the chapters end with summaries, which, given the detailed and technical nature of the material within each chapter, do not add any value to the book, and could be excised without loss. The four appendices offer some valuable information: numerous online resources for readers seeking reference material; development tools for the most popular Web browsers; details on JavaScript closures; and a quick reference for the jQuery selector expressions and all of the methods. The weakest part of the book, the index, is inadequate — missing important terms, such as "animation," "callback," "iteration" (or "iterator"), and "toggling."

The following errata have yet to be listed on the book's support page: "Let[']s" (page 23), "page [is] loaded" (page 40), "if Normal was" (should read "if Normal were"; page 61), ", though" (should read "though,"; page 80), "user the $() factory function" (page 113), "slices with be" (page 283), and "though[,] there" (page 340). In the errata listed on the support page, the entry for parseFloat refers to page 74, but the error actually occurs once on page 69 and twice on pages 70, 71, and 79. In the six screenshots on pages 253 through 257, the shipping totals are incorrect. Nevertheless, the number of errata per page is far less than what is found in most computer books, especially those from Packt Publishing.

The generous amount of sample code should be quite helpful to the reader, because for most programmers, we learn best by example. However, there are many instances where a line of code is unnecessarily wrapped to a second line, even though there is plenty of room at the end of the first line to accommodate the portion of code forced down; pages 82 and 217 have glaring examples of this. The same premature wrapping is seen in some of the text, such as on pages 210 and 311.

The authors as a whole do an admirable job of explaining the central ideas. The explanations are generally clear, which is absolutely critical for a topic like jQuery that can be overwhelming to anyone unfamiliar with it — and not just as a result of the somewhat cryptic syntax (which admittedly is unavoidable), made worse by chaining and especially by the nesting of anonymous functions. Even a cursory glance through the book should make evident that the authors put a lot of effort into writing it, reflected not just in its substantial length, but also the number of examples they created for the book, and the functionality contained therein.

With its thorough coverage of key jQuery topics — from the basics to plug-in development — Learning jQuery 1.3 is an information-packed resource that can help Web developers learn how to take their JavaScript programming to the next level.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer.

You can purchase Learning jQuery 1.3 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all Web technologies, JavaScript may have the most checkered past — first heralded as a powerful object-oriented language for jazzing up Web pages, but later condemned as a source of spammy pop-up windows and horrid animations polluting websites everywhere. Yet during the past several years, Web designers and developers are increasingly using JavaScript unobtrusively, for client-site interactivity — as a supplement to server-side functionality, not a replacement, and built upon standards-compliant (X)HTML and CSS. As a result, the once-derided language is now enjoying a true resurgence in interest and use. This has been bolstered by the proliferation of JavaScript libraries, of which jQuery is clearly the front runner. Web programmers seeking to get up to speed on this exciting resource can turn to Learning jQuery 1.3: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Learning jQuery 1.3 author Jonathan Chaffer, Karl Swedberg pages 444 pages publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1847196705 summary A detailed introduction to this popular JavaScript library. Written by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg — two veteran Web developers based in Grand Rapids, Michigan — Learning jQuery 1.3 was published on 13 February 2009, under the ISBN 978-1847196705, by Packt Publishing, which kindly provided to me a copy of the book for review. There is a publisher's Web page for the book, where readers can order print or PDF versions of the book (or both, at a sizable discount); contact Packt Publishing with questions or feedback; read more information about the book, the authors, and the table of contents; and download a free sample chapter (the fourth one, titled "Effects") in PDF format. Readers who want to follow along with the authors' discussion, should note that all of the sample code used in the book can be downloaded from its support page. There is also a link for reading the reported errata, of which there are eleven, as of this writing. (The erratum for page 40 is incorrectly listed twice.)

The book begins with a foreword by John Resig, the creator of jQuery. What follows is over 400 pages of information, organized into eleven chapters and four appendices, covering all of the major topics related to jQuery, after a quick-start chapter: selectors, events, effects, DOM manipulation, AJAX, tables, forms, shufflers and rotators, plug-ins, online resources, development tools, and closures. The book has all the ingredients to serve as a full introduction to jQuery for experienced Web programmers, because it assumes no prior knowledge of jQuery (or any other JavaScript libraries); but it does assume that the reader comprehends the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — thus not wasting time by teaching these prerequisites skills, as is attempted in some other Web programming books.

The first chapter may be brief, but it is sufficient to present the major features of jQuery, its advantages versus raw JavaScript, and a quick history of its various releases after it was first mentioned by John Resig in August 2005. In addition, the reader is shown where to obtain the library, how to add it to a Web page, and a few of its basic capabilities. In the given example, multiple HTML paragraph elements are styled using just three lines of code; yet the power of jQuery would have been demonstrated even better had the authors also shown the equivalent raw JavaScript needed to perform the same functionality.

The next four chapters present the basics of jQuery upon which everything that follows is built. Readers are introduced, in Chapter 2, to the jQuery syntax for accessing individual elements and groups of elements on a Web page, using the $() factory function, CSS selectors, and jQuery's own custom selectors. As with all of the chapters that follow, several examples are used to illustrate the core ideas. The ability to intercept and react to events on a Web page — such as a user clicking on a particular link — is an essential part of client-side interactivity, and is the topic of the third chapter. But first the groundwork is set by learning how to control when code is executed, how to utilize multiple scripts on a page, and how to use jQuery with other JavaScript libraries. Then a style switcher example is used to demonstrate the "this" keyword, shorthand event methods, and compound events, as well as event capturing, bubbling, objects, targets, propagation, delegation, namespacing, and other topics. Unfortunately, the screenshots are of little help, largely because the black-and-white images fail to show user feedback, such as green backgrounds on hover, and even bolded link text. Chapter 4, which covers jQuery effects, begins by explaining how to programmatically discover and save attribute values, for later use; then it explains how to hide and show HTML elements, fade them in and out, toggle their settings, create simple custom animations, invoke effects sequentially using queuing, and queue effects on different elements using callback functions. The fifth chapter shows how to easily add and remove elements and their attributes from the DOM, and even create a new DOM structure from scratch. Most of the sample code is well explained, except for the fourth line in the insertAfter() snippet on page 96, which is not clear at all. Also, the sample text that consumes the bulk of pages 98 and 99, should be replaced with something much shorter, partly because it would be easier to locate the "span" tags within the text. This chapter, like the previous one, concludes with a "nutshell" summary that is quite helpful — and would be even more so if it listed, next to each jQuery method, the corresponding page number.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is a combination of technologies that is seeing more widespread use every year, as developers discover the advantages of dynamic Web page interactivity without the reloading of the page each time, which of course slows down the process for the user. The sixth chapter shows how to utilize AJAX, from a jQuery perspective, with explanations and examples of the four major approaches that involve static data files, including a handy summary of when each approach would be most appropriate. Also explored are the dynamic AJAX strategies, including GET and POST requests. The authors should have mentioned that, in order to make functional the "E" and "F" dictionary entries in the example, the reader will need to load the index.html file using a Web server, and not as a static HTML file, so the calls to "e.php" and "f.php" will work. By the way, anyone confused by the reference to jQuery Reference Guide, on page 146, should be aware that it is the title of a book written by the same authors as this one.

With the seventh chapter, the authors transition from what they consider to be the tutorial portion of the book, and begin to demonstrate how the reader can utilize the earlier basics for improving Web page functionality — in this case, working with tables. The authors make good use of code snippets and screenshots to show how one can do table sorting, row striping, row highlighting, and other capabilities independent of — and in conjunction with — server-side equivalents. The subsequent chapter consists of a similar survey of jQuery goodness, but applied to forms — specifically: styling, client-side validation, auto-completion of search entry fields, and input masking (with an emphasis upon numbers). The sample HTML is a model of quality markup, except for the wrapping of checkbox input elements inside of label elements, which is noncanonical and can make it problematic to properly align all the checkboxes in a form vertically, for all browsers. Chapter 9, titled "Shufflers and Rotators," demonstrates how to create a rotator for RSS newsfeed headlines, and an image carousel featuring image enlargement with transition. Readers interested in testing out the sample code — and possibly even modifying it — should be aware that, for chapters 7 through 9, the sample code within the downloadable archive is not stored in chapter-named directories, but instead combined into an application, in the "bookstore" directory.

The last two chapters of the book are devoted to jQuery plug-ins — using those created by others, and developing one's own. In Chapter 10, to illustrate the high-level ideas, the authors focus on and recommend a number of specific plug-ins built for handling forms, advanced effects, widgets, tables, images, and charts, as well as some theming resources. In the subsequent chapter, the authors show how to develop plug-ins of varying complexity, including those that implement new global functions, implement new jQuery object methods, and extend the jQuery selector engine; the chapter wraps up with advice on how best to distribute newly-created plug-ins.

All of the chapters end with summaries, which, given the detailed and technical nature of the material within each chapter, do not add any value to the book, and could be excised without loss. The four appendices offer some valuable information: numerous online resources for readers seeking reference material; development tools for the most popular Web browsers; details on JavaScript closures; and a quick reference for the jQuery selector expressions and all of the methods. The weakest part of the book, the index, is inadequate — missing important terms, such as "animation," "callback," "iteration" (or "iterator"), and "toggling."

The following errata have yet to be listed on the book's support page: "Let[']s" (page 23), "page [is] loaded" (page 40), "if Normal was" (should read "if Normal were"; page 61), ", though" (should read "though,"; page 80), "user the $() factory function" (page 113), "slices with be" (page 283), and "though[,] there" (page 340). In the errata listed on the support page, the entry for parseFloat refers to page 74, but the error actually occurs once on page 69 and twice on pages 70, 71, and 79. In the six screenshots on pages 253 through 257, the shipping totals are incorrect. Nevertheless, the number of errata per page is far less than what is found in most computer books, especially those from Packt Publishing.

The generous amount of sample code should be quite helpful to the reader, because for most programmers, we learn best by example. However, there are many instances where a line of code is unnecessarily wrapped to a second line, even though there is plenty of room at the end of the first line to accommodate the portion of code forced down; pages 82 and 217 have glaring examples of this. The same premature wrapping is seen in some of the text, such as on pages 210 and 311.

The authors as a whole do an admirable job of explaining the central ideas. The explanations are generally clear, which is absolutely critical for a topic like jQuery that can be overwhelming to anyone unfamiliar with it — and not just as a result of the somewhat cryptic syntax (which admittedly is unavoidable), made worse by chaining and especially by the nesting of anonymous functions. Even a cursory glance through the book should make evident that the authors put a lot of effort into writing it, reflected not just in its substantial length, but also the number of examples they created for the book, and the functionality contained therein.

With its thorough coverage of key jQuery topics — from the basics to plug-in development — Learning jQuery 1.3 is an information-packed resource that can help Web developers learn how to take their JavaScript programming to the next level.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer.

You can purchase Learning jQuery 1.3 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes"Experienced Web designers and developers will readily admit that the most challenging aspect of their professions is not the technical work itself, nor learning the tools of the trade, but rather dealing with clients. Within that area, the most frustrating type of work — aside from the ever-joyless chore of collecting on invoices — is getting (non-technical) clients to understand the possibilities and limitations of Web technologies, design decisions, and all the other factors that can make or break a website project, as well as the site itself. Yet this process can be just as unhappy, and far more confusing, to prospective site owners, who typically are quite knowledgeable of their own fields, but have little to no understanding of how best to ensure the success of any website project they sponsor. Aiming to bridge this gap, is the appropriately-titled Website Owner's Manual." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Website Owner's Manual author Paul Boag pages 296 pages publisher Manning Publications rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1933988450 summary A guidebook for anyone responsible for a new website. This book was written by Paul Boag, a veteran Web designer and the Creative Director of Headscape, a British design agency. He speaks at industry events, writes articles for various Web design publications, and cohosts Boagworld, "the podcast for all those involved in designing, developing, and running websites on a daily basis." The book was published on 1 December 2009 by Manning Publications, under the ISBN 978-1933988450. The publisher makes available a Web page for the book, where visitors can order print or electronic versions (purchasing the former entitles one to the latter), read the ancillary portions of the book (the table of contents, the index, etc.), read some reviewers' comments, and download two sample chapters for free: "Chapter 1: The secret to a successful website" and "Chapter 7: Ensuring access for all."

Spanning 296 pages, the book's material is grouped into twelve chapters, covering the following topics: the role and challenges of a website owner; planning a site development project; crafting a project brief, and choosing the team to implement it; how to work with a designer and understand design basics; optimal website content; site usability and testing; site accessibility, and what can undermine it; content management systems; an overview of the Web, browsers, and hosting; online and off-line promotion, including search engine optimization and marketing performance; how to develop your site into an online community, and the many benefits of doing so; preparing your website for the future. The dozen chapters can be thought of as forming three parts, although they are not formally labeled as such.

The book's first chapter is titled "The secret to a successful website," which is also the book's subtitle — at least, as shown on the cover, but oddly not on the title page. It is a poorly chosen chapter title, partly because the author repudiates it on the first page, and partly because it suggests that there is but one element to a successful website, and it is being kept a secret. (One can only hope that the publisher's marketing department is not planning on keeping it a secret.). Fortunately, the silly title does not reflect the chapter's content, which may be brief, but offers sensible advice to any business owner who decides that she needs a new website, or works within an organization and has been given that role. The reader is warned of the dangers of information overload, specialization in only one area of site ownership, and the common failure to comprehend the critical responsibilities of that role: balancing conflicting priorities, defining the role, and planning for the future. This chapter, like all that follow, concludes with a "Next actions" section, containing several tasks that the reader is advised to implement, in order to get the most benefit from the chapter's recommendations.

Chapter 2, titled "Stress-free planning," explores several ways that a website owner can proactively lay the groundwork for a successful Web project: understanding the objectives of an entirely new site or changes to a legacy one, and the organization as a whole; consulting with stakeholders; developing criteria for success; obtaining feedback on an existing site, if any, as well as the competition's sites; and understanding the site's future audience, and representing them in the form of personas. The author posits that this information forms a prerequisite for writing a site brief and assembling "The perfect team," which is the title of the third chapter. He begins by listing the major advantages of either using an internal Web team or outsourcing to an external agency, or choosing a combination thereof (an option that far too many business owners fail to consider, even when it may be the ideal choice). Perhaps one of the most valuable sections of the book is the discussion on how to create an effective brief, and the reasons for doing so even for small and/or internally sourced projects. However, readers may be confused by the assertion on page 49 that revenue can be estimated from profits, when in fact profits are calculated from revenues (less expenses). The chapter concludes with some excellent advice on how to choose the ideal outside team to complete one's Web project, if one has decided to outsource the work.

The second part of the book begins with the fourth chapter, and presupposes that the reader has created a brief and a statement of work, selected a team to implement the latter, and everyone involved has attended a kickoff meeting. Now begins the critical phase of site design, and the author provides sound recommendations on how to avoid some of the most common Web design pitfalls: neglecting the target audience, failing to test the design, designing by committee or on-the-fly, micromanaging the design decisions, overloading the site's homepage, and settling for a corporate brand or page layout that ill-serves the site user and thus the organization. The chapter concludes with discussion of some key topics in the design world: the user's screen resolution, the fold, and the three options for page layout (fixed, fluid, and elastic). Chapter 5 delves into "Creating killer content" — specifically, the importance of context, brevity, logical and user-centric information architecture (through card sorting and use cases), and text that is engaging and easy to read.

In Chapter 6, the author examines a number of aspects of user testing: costs and benefits thereof, techniques for dramatically reducing the former while maximizing the latter, the selection of test subjects, and how best to run usability test sessions and then capitalize on the results in order to hone the website before and during its design. The subsequent chapter — which covers website accessibility — shares common ground with user testing, in some respects, because site testing is an effective post-development strategy to discover accessibility problems. Yet this should be supplemented proactively with an adequate understanding of how to make one's site accessible using standards-based design and coding. The author makes clear the many advantages of separating presentation from content, and of maximizing a site's accessibility — largely by building upon said separation. However, his advice to website owners to read and understand the WCAG 2 guidelines is arguably unrealistic, given that those specifications are admittedly "extensive and highly technical in places"; all clients in my experience would dismiss the suggestion immediately.

Mentioned earlier in the book — as a potential tool for creating a wireframe of a site — content management systems (CMSs) take center stage in Chapter 8, which explores their advantages and disadvantages. One of the criticisms leveled at CMSs — that they reduce site quality by allowing greater user input — is unfair, since a hand-coded, non-CMS site could only allow similar user input with far greater risk (imagine non-technical employees butchering HTML files by editing them in word processors!). Nevertheless, the issues raised by the author definitely need to be considered by anyone planning a CMS-based website. When researching and comparing available CMSs, a business person planning a new site will encounter a plethora of technical terms, many of which are explained in Chapter 9, titled "Decoding technobabble." Yet these terms are just as likely to be encountered during the phases discussed in the book's earlier chapters, and thus this material should have been placed at the beginning of the book, with the suggestion that tech-savvy readers could skip over it; or, the chapter could have been made an appendix, with a similar message at the beginning of the book, pointing to the appendix for those unsure of Web terminology. The only glaring mistake is the statement that "the web consists of a vast network of computers spread across the globe"; that's not the Web, but rather the Internet. Nevertheless, the author's lucid introduction to Web technologies and terms could be a real help to non-technical readers.

The last three chapters can be thought of as the post-launch part of the book, because at this stage in the process, the website owner has completed the build phase, and is now ready to begin increasing the popularity and usage of the site. Chapter 10, titled "Driving traffic," explains the pitfalls and best practices in trying to promote one's site using search engines, social media, and other methods of reaching an audience and measuring the results. The material serves as a decent introduction to the topics, including a brief overview of Google AdWords (although it incorrectly states that AdWords prices start at $.10 per click, when in fact it is one cent). The next chapter explores what is involved in building a vibrant community online, as well as the costs and benefits of doing so. The final chapter, "Planning for the future," begins by warning against the wasteful but common practice of organizations commissioning brand new websites every few years, to replace the previous ones that fell into neglect, oftentimes because the website owner failed to maintain a strong relationship with the site designer. The bulk of the chapter explores emerging trends in the Web world, such as rich media, Web services, and mobile devices.

The book concludes with an index that is quite complete — a characteristic now rarely seen in programming books. Credit should also be given for the neat format and indentation of the table of contents, which facilitates quick scanning.

The text is interspersed with some screenshots, graphs, and, most welcome of all, cartoons that reflect the author's sense of humor and illustrate the conflicts and misunderstandings that can arise during site development and maintenance. All of the screenshots and other technical illustrations are well captioned, except for the one on page 33, which contains an extraneous space after the "link:," and would be baffling if taken at face value, without examining the Google Search screenshot. Sadly reflecting our era of texting and grammatical sloppiness, the chapter titles are not presented in title case, but instead in sentence case — which is especially confusing when they are embedded within sentences in the text. On several pages (45, 60, 86, 91, 102, 140, 185, 186, 209-211, etc.) at least one paragraph contains an errant newline character or is missing an indentation of a paragraph. In general, the production quality of the book does not match the value of the information.

First editions of technical books are usually riddled with errata, and this one is no exception: "Aesthetics refer[s]" (page 5), "principle" (should read "principal"; page 6), "We respects" (page 7, in the form), "site [owner] considers" (9), "Planning give" (16), "possible accessibility problem[s]" (30), "us the web" (37), "she is gives" (37), "a internal" (45), "amazon.com" (47, twice), "suitable [ones]" (48), "are [a] number" (56), "Recommenede" (56), "a RSS" (73), "Resolution affect[s]" (82), "branding and designs" (86), "Pages... needs" (91), "to[o] hard" (94), "This techniques" (95), "can't achieved" (96), "was" (should read "were"; 102 and elsewhere), "content stand out" (104), "Using" (should read "Use"; 104), "on the identifying," (105), "used. and" (111), "longer that than" (115), "This also it" (118), "a certainly level across" (141), "approach take" (141), "JavaS-cript" (143), "then if" (147), "Wordpress" (157), "pervious version" (no joke!; 161), "a enterprise" (161), "open [a] web browser" (173), "photo book" (should read "phonebook"; 173), "than are" (should read "that are"; 175), "in obscure language" (178), and at that point I gave up and stopped recording them. Given the modest length of this book, there are far too many errors such as these.

Readers will likely find that there are two major weaknesses in this book: Firstly, some of the discussion, especially in the first half, is a bit too high level, at times almost like an outline for a meatier discussion — one encompassing more specific information as to how the reader could implement and measure the principles provided. Similarly, because many of the suggestions are fairly general, they would greatly benefit from more examples — either contrived or, even better, real world occurrences — perhaps from Headscape's past projects, with names changed if needed. These could demonstrate the key ideas, and make it easier for readers to see the truth of those ideas in their own past experiences, and then apply them in the future. Fortunately, the book does employee several hypothetical case studies that are incorporated into the narrative, at various points; those are helpful, as are the screenshots that illustrate violations of design best practices.

Secondly, and more importantly, almost no advice is given as to what to do when things go wrong. What can the website owner do when an external design agency begins missing deadlines, but appears to be making an honest effort? What can be done when interdepartmental bickering threatens to sink the specifications process? These and other critical topics are not addressed. (Readers undoubtedly could think of other common scenarios.) It would have been terrific had the author shared hard-won lessons gleaned from his background and those of his colleagues, as well as what methods they found to be effective in squelching those crises, and which ones proved ineffective, and why. Those case studies alone would most likely have been worth the price of the book — again, with no need to disclose the names of the participants. Perhaps there would prove to be enough material to make for a second book.

The writing style can be described using Web design terms: fluid and accessible — although there are some run-on sentences from a lack of well-placed commas. The author explains the topics in a straightforward manner, without the assumptions and jargon that undermine communication between Web experts and non-technical businesspeople. This is one reason why this book should be of value not only to people responsible for websites in organizations of all sizes, but also to designers, developers, user interface specialists, and all other Web professionals who communicate with project managers and end-users.

Website Owner's Manual is a valuable resource that benefits from the experience and insight of a veteran Web designer, and clearly presents guidelines that site managers can follow for maximizing the odds of successful site design, implementation, and maintenance.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer.

You can purchase Website Owner's Manual from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes"Experienced Web designers and developers will readily admit that the most challenging aspect of their professions is not the technical work itself, nor learning the tools of the trade, but rather dealing with clients. Within that area, the most frustrating type of work — aside from the ever-joyless chore of collecting on invoices — is getting (non-technical) clients to understand the possibilities and limitations of Web technologies, design decisions, and all the other factors that can make or break a website project, as well as the site itself. Yet this process can be just as unhappy, and far more confusing, to prospective site owners, who typically are quite knowledgeable of their own fields, but have little to no understanding of how best to ensure the success of any website project they sponsor. Aiming to bridge this gap, is the appropriately-titled Website Owner's Manual." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Website Owner's Manual author Paul Boag pages 296 pages publisher Manning Publications rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1933988450 summary A guidebook for anyone responsible for a new website. This book was written by Paul Boag, a veteran Web designer and the Creative Director of Headscape, a British design agency. He speaks at industry events, writes articles for various Web design publications, and cohosts Boagworld, "the podcast for all those involved in designing, developing, and running websites on a daily basis." The book was published on 1 December 2009 by Manning Publications, under the ISBN 978-1933988450. The publisher makes available a Web page for the book, where visitors can order print or electronic versions (purchasing the former entitles one to the latter), read the ancillary portions of the book (the table of contents, the index, etc.), read some reviewers' comments, and download two sample chapters for free: "Chapter 1: The secret to a successful website" and "Chapter 7: Ensuring access for all."

Spanning 296 pages, the book's material is grouped into twelve chapters, covering the following topics: the role and challenges of a website owner; planning a site development project; crafting a project brief, and choosing the team to implement it; how to work with a designer and understand design basics; optimal website content; site usability and testing; site accessibility, and what can undermine it; content management systems; an overview of the Web, browsers, and hosting; online and off-line promotion, including search engine optimization and marketing performance; how to develop your site into an online community, and the many benefits of doing so; preparing your website for the future. The dozen chapters can be thought of as forming three parts, although they are not formally labeled as such.

The book's first chapter is titled "The secret to a successful website," which is also the book's subtitle — at least, as shown on the cover, but oddly not on the title page. It is a poorly chosen chapter title, partly because the author repudiates it on the first page, and partly because it suggests that there is but one element to a successful website, and it is being kept a secret. (One can only hope that the publisher's marketing department is not planning on keeping it a secret.). Fortunately, the silly title does not reflect the chapter's content, which may be brief, but offers sensible advice to any business owner who decides that she needs a new website, or works within an organization and has been given that role. The reader is warned of the dangers of information overload, specialization in only one area of site ownership, and the common failure to comprehend the critical responsibilities of that role: balancing conflicting priorities, defining the role, and planning for the future. This chapter, like all that follow, concludes with a "Next actions" section, containing several tasks that the reader is advised to implement, in order to get the most benefit from the chapter's recommendations.

Chapter 2, titled "Stress-free planning," explores several ways that a website owner can proactively lay the groundwork for a successful Web project: understanding the objectives of an entirely new site or changes to a legacy one, and the organization as a whole; consulting with stakeholders; developing criteria for success; obtaining feedback on an existing site, if any, as well as the competition's sites; and understanding the site's future audience, and representing them in the form of personas. The author posits that this information forms a prerequisite for writing a site brief and assembling "The perfect team," which is the title of the third chapter. He begins by listing the major advantages of either using an internal Web team or outsourcing to an external agency, or choosing a combination thereof (an option that far too many business owners fail to consider, even when it may be the ideal choice). Perhaps one of the most valuable sections of the book is the discussion on how to create an effective brief, and the reasons for doing so even for small and/or internally sourced projects. However, readers may be confused by the assertion on page 49 that revenue can be estimated from profits, when in fact profits are calculated from revenues (less expenses). The chapter concludes with some excellent advice on how to choose the ideal outside team to complete one's Web project, if one has decided to outsource the work.

The second part of the book begins with the fourth chapter, and presupposes that the reader has created a brief and a statement of work, selected a team to implement the latter, and everyone involved has attended a kickoff meeting. Now begins the critical phase of site design, and the author provides sound recommendations on how to avoid some of the most common Web design pitfalls: neglecting the target audience, failing to test the design, designing by committee or on-the-fly, micromanaging the design decisions, overloading the site's homepage, and settling for a corporate brand or page layout that ill-serves the site user and thus the organization. The chapter concludes with discussion of some key topics in the design world: the user's screen resolution, the fold, and the three options for page layout (fixed, fluid, and elastic). Chapter 5 delves into "Creating killer content" — specifically, the importance of context, brevity, logical and user-centric information architecture (through card sorting and use cases), and text that is engaging and easy to read.

In Chapter 6, the author examines a number of aspects of user testing: costs and benefits thereof, techniques for dramatically reducing the former while maximizing the latter, the selection of test subjects, and how best to run usability test sessions and then capitalize on the results in order to hone the website before and during its design. The subsequent chapter — which covers website accessibility — shares common ground with user testing, in some respects, because site testing is an effective post-development strategy to discover accessibility problems. Yet this should be supplemented proactively with an adequate understanding of how to make one's site accessible using standards-based design and coding. The author makes clear the many advantages of separating presentation from content, and of maximizing a site's accessibility — largely by building upon said separation. However, his advice to website owners to read and understand the WCAG 2 guidelines is arguably unrealistic, given that those specifications are admittedly "extensive and highly technical in places"; all clients in my experience would dismiss the suggestion immediately.

Mentioned earlier in the book — as a potential tool for creating a wireframe of a site — content management systems (CMSs) take center stage in Chapter 8, which explores their advantages and disadvantages. One of the criticisms leveled at CMSs — that they reduce site quality by allowing greater user input — is unfair, since a hand-coded, non-CMS site could only allow similar user input with far greater risk (imagine non-technical employees butchering HTML files by editing them in word processors!). Nevertheless, the issues raised by the author definitely need to be considered by anyone planning a CMS-based website. When researching and comparing available CMSs, a business person planning a new site will encounter a plethora of technical terms, many of which are explained in Chapter 9, titled "Decoding technobabble." Yet these terms are just as likely to be encountered during the phases discussed in the book's earlier chapters, and thus this material should have been placed at the beginning of the book, with the suggestion that tech-savvy readers could skip over it; or, the chapter could have been made an appendix, with a similar message at the beginning of the book, pointing to the appendix for those unsure of Web terminology. The only glaring mistake is the statement that "the web consists of a vast network of computers spread across the globe"; that's not the Web, but rather the Internet. Nevertheless, the author's lucid introduction to Web technologies and terms could be a real help to non-technical readers.

The last three chapters can be thought of as the post-launch part of the book, because at this stage in the process, the website owner has completed the build phase, and is now ready to begin increasing the popularity and usage of the site. Chapter 10, titled "Driving traffic," explains the pitfalls and best practices in trying to promote one's site using search engines, social media, and other methods of reaching an audience and measuring the results. The material serves as a decent introduction to the topics, including a brief overview of Google AdWords (although it incorrectly states that AdWords prices start at $.10 per click, when in fact it is one cent). The next chapter explores what is involved in building a vibrant community online, as well as the costs and benefits of doing so. The final chapter, "Planning for the future," begins by warning against the wasteful but common practice of organizations commissioning brand new websites every few years, to replace the previous ones that fell into neglect, oftentimes because the website owner failed to maintain a strong relationship with the site designer. The bulk of the chapter explores emerging trends in the Web world, such as rich media, Web services, and mobile devices.

The book concludes with an index that is quite complete — a characteristic now rarely seen in programming books. Credit should also be given for the neat format and indentation of the table of contents, which facilitates quick scanning.

The text is interspersed with some screenshots, graphs, and, most welcome of all, cartoons that reflect the author's sense of humor and illustrate the conflicts and misunderstandings that can arise during site development and maintenance. All of the screenshots and other technical illustrations are well captioned, except for the one on page 33, which contains an extraneous space after the "link:," and would be baffling if taken at face value, without examining the Google Search screenshot. Sadly reflecting our era of texting and grammatical sloppiness, the chapter titles are not presented in title case, but instead in sentence case — which is especially confusing when they are embedded within sentences in the text. On several pages (45, 60, 86, 91, 102, 140, 185, 186, 209-211, etc.) at least one paragraph contains an errant newline character or is missing an indentation of a paragraph. In general, the production quality of the book does not match the value of the information.

First editions of technical books are usually riddled with errata, and this one is no exception: "Aesthetics refer[s]" (page 5), "principle" (should read "principal"; page 6), "We respects" (page 7, in the form), "site [owner] considers" (9), "Planning give" (16), "possible accessibility problem[s]" (30), "us the web" (37), "she is gives" (37), "a internal" (45), "amazon.com" (47, twice), "suitable [ones]" (48), "are [a] number" (56), "Recommenede" (56), "a RSS" (73), "Resolution affect[s]" (82), "branding and designs" (86), "Pages... needs" (91), "to[o] hard" (94), "This techniques" (95), "can't achieved" (96), "was" (should read "were"; 102 and elsewhere), "content stand out" (104), "Using" (should read "Use"; 104), "on the identifying," (105), "used. and" (111), "longer that than" (115), "This also it" (118), "a certainly level across" (141), "approach take" (141), "JavaS-cript" (143), "then if" (147), "Wordpress" (157), "pervious version" (no joke!; 161), "a enterprise" (161), "open [a] web browser" (173), "photo book" (should read "phonebook"; 173), "than are" (should read "that are"; 175), "in obscure language" (178), and at that point I gave up and stopped recording them. Given the modest length of this book, there are far too many errors such as these.

Readers will likely find that there are two major weaknesses in this book: Firstly, some of the discussion, especially in the first half, is a bit too high level, at times almost like an outline for a meatier discussion — one encompassing more specific information as to how the reader could implement and measure the principles provided. Similarly, because many of the suggestions are fairly general, they would greatly benefit from more examples — either contrived or, even better, real world occurrences — perhaps from Headscape's past projects, with names changed if needed. These could demonstrate the key ideas, and make it easier for readers to see the truth of those ideas in their own past experiences, and then apply them in the future. Fortunately, the book does employee several hypothetical case studies that are incorporated into the narrative, at various points; those are helpful, as are the screenshots that illustrate violations of design best practices.

Secondly, and more importantly, almost no advice is given as to what to do when things go wrong. What can the website owner do when an external design agency begins missing deadlines, but appears to be making an honest effort? What can be done when interdepartmental bickering threatens to sink the specifications process? These and other critical topics are not addressed. (Readers undoubtedly could think of other common scenarios.) It would have been terrific had the author shared hard-won lessons gleaned from his background and those of his colleagues, as well as what methods they found to be effective in squelching those crises, and which ones proved ineffective, and why. Those case studies alone would most likely have been worth the price of the book — again, with no need to disclose the names of the participants. Perhaps there would prove to be enough material to make for a second book.

The writing style can be described using Web design terms: fluid and accessible — although there are some run-on sentences from a lack of well-placed commas. The author explains the topics in a straightforward manner, without the assumptions and jargon that undermine communication between Web experts and non-technical businesspeople. This is one reason why this book should be of value not only to people responsible for websites in organizations of all sizes, but also to designers, developers, user interface specialists, and all other Web professionals who communicate with project managers and end-users.

Website Owner's Manual is a valuable resource that benefits from the experience and insight of a veteran Web designer, and clearly presents guidelines that site managers can follow for maximizing the odds of successful site design, implementation, and maintenance.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer.

You can purchase Website Owner's Manual from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "The shopping cart systems that power online stores have evolved from simple homebrew solutions in the CGI era to far more powerful open source packages, such as osCommerce. But even the later systems are frequently criticized as suffering from poorly-written code and inadequate documentation — as well as for being difficult to install and administer, and nearly impossible to enhance with new functionality and improved site styling, at least without hiring outside help. These problems alone would explain the rapidly growing interest in the latest generation of shopping cart systems, such as Magento, purported to be outpacing all others in adoption. In turn, technical publishers are making available books to help developers and site owners get started with this e-commerce alternative, such as Magento: Beginner's Guide, written by William Rice." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Magento: Beginner's Guide author William Rice pages 300 publisher Packt Publishing rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1847195944 summary A starter guide to this popular e-commerce shopping cart. This title was published on 15 April 2009 by Packt Publishing, under the ISBN 978-1847195944. The firm makes available a Web page dedicated to the book, where visitors can find information on how to purchase the print or PDF versions of the book (or both as a bundle, at substantial savings). The site also has a link labeled "Code download" (even though there isn't any downloadable code), another link for viewing any errata (of which there is one reported, as of this writing), and a link for downloading a sample chapter (the third one, "Categories and Attributes").

The bulk of the book's 300 pages are organized into eleven chapters, which are intended to take the reader through the basic topics, in the same order they might be encountered by anyone developing a Magento-based store for the first time: an introduction; Magento system requirements and installation; product categories and attributes; tax rules; adding product information; site styling; advanced product functionality; CRM; payment processing; shipping configuration; and order fulfillment. These chapters are followed by an appendix that delineates, as numbered lists, all of the steps covered in greater detail in the chapters. The book concludes with an index whose value is immediately brought into question by the "products" entry, which presumably would be one of the most lengthy sections for an e-commerce book such as this one, yet contains only two entries, and neither one has a page number.

The book's first chapter begins by stating what Magento and the book offer, which were already covered in the preface. The author then introduces the demo store (an online vendor of coffee beans) to be used throughout the book, with screenshots. Readers can skip over this chapter, without missing anything of importance. This chapter, like all that follow, concludes with a summary, which adds no value to the book.

In Chapter 2, the author patiently steps the non-technical user through each phase of installing Magento on a Web server, with an emphasis upon Linux systems, which apparently are far less problematic for Magento than using a Windows-based hosting account (imagine that). PHP novices will likely appreciate the author's tip on how to use phpinfo() to see their server settings, but should be warned to delete that file so hackers cannot also stumble upon that information. Also, there are some technical inaccuracies in the author's discussion of search engine friendly URLs. In step 1 of the installation, he should have explained why he chose the Full Release and not the Downloader. On page 31, he instructs the reader to set some Magento files to permissions of 777, even though the previous page stated that his Web hosts' control panel does not allow that setting. Some readers may be confused by this, and should be advised to use their FTP programs for accomplishing this task, if their control panel has the same limitation. In step 3, the author could have provided some guidance as to what the reader can do if Magento refuses to proceed with the installation and provides no error messages, even though the database information is valid and confirmable by logging in at the command line. Of course, it is difficult to anticipate all the possible problems that a user may encounter. Even the official Magento documentation does not appear to address this particular issue. Lastly, the checklist at the end of the chapter, which specifies four items to confirm prior to installation, obviously should have been presented at the beginning of the chapter.

In the third chapter, the author explores some key concepts needed in working with Magento: products, categories, and attributes. Throughout the book, these three common terms — and later, "shopping cart," "payment gateways," etc. — are presented in title case, as if they were proper names, which they are not. Within the text, this formatting gives them the appearance of menu or page names, which quickly becomes annoying. A glaring example of this is section 16 on page 59. On the same page, the reader will encounter a rather cryptic heading, "Have a go hero." Nonetheless, readers should find the topic coverage to be quite useful, including tips on enabling a product navigation menu, optimizing categories, entering products, creating product images, and setting attributes. The next two chapters explain how to apply taxes to customer purchases, and how to add "simple products" (those without customer-changeable attributes), respectively. At first glance, one might conclude that Chapter 5 should immediately follow Chapter 3 — or be combined into one chapter — since both deal primarily with products. But within Magento, tax rules are a prerequisite for properly creating new products in one's store, so the chosen order makes sense.

The author shifts gears with the sixth chapter, which explores basic styling, i.e., customizing the appearance of a Magento-based storefront. The majority of the changes can be accomplished easily by the reader, because most of them are made within the Magento administrative area, and not through any involved editing of the CSS files of the default theme. Chapter 7 covers the topics of related products, grouped products, and configurable products — and thus clearly should have followed Chapter 5. Regardless, the author's use of illustrative examples, in creating the demo site, is quite helpful for the reader to see how to use each dialog box in the process of creating the various types of products.

The last four chapters of Magento: Beginner's Guide address four essential aspects of building and running an online store, beyond the products themselves: Chapter 8 is fairly brief, but explains how to configure a store's e-mail addresses and contact form (but not how to customize the e-mail templates), as well as the functionality made available by Magento for administering customers once they have become registered users on the store site. The subsequent chapter shows how to set up a Magento site to accept customer payments using PayPal, Authorize.Net, and other electronic payment options. Chapter 10 explains how to configure the various shipping options within Magento, and, like the previous chapter, focuses on trade-offs among the various options rather than the details of how to complete each dialog box. Confusingly, on page 219, the author states that you can charge a handling fee with the flat rate method, but four pages earlier states the exact opposite. The last chapter in the book covers the various phases of order fulfillment, as well as order management.

Despite the value of the book's contents, the material would have benefited from some proper editing, evidenced alone by the many errata: "freelance[r]" (on the "About the reviewer" page), "[and] so" (page 2), "distinguishes" (page 3), "top[-]two" (page 10), "Paypal" (page 11), "Card(saved)" (page 11), "php" (page 13), "reading and article" (page 17), "you web host" (page 27), "/single-origin-coffees" is missing (page 55), "Attribute[']s Model" (page 73), "Add New [Attribute] Set" (page 75), "answer[s]" (page 78), "zip codes" (pages 85-86, and others), "characters;" (should be a comma; page 104), "later [in the] book" (page 131), "discuss about" (page 131), "direct[ion] replacement" (page 133), "graphics;" (should be a comma; page 138), "tab. to" (page 141), "2@ brew..." (page 182), "can sit[e]" (page 190), "such [as] Visa" (page 195), and "Shopping Card" (page 197). Some of these errata are likely not attributable to the author, but instead introduced during the production phase of publication. There are other indicators that quality control was lacking, such as an errant period tacked on to every "Chapter 5" in the page title, on all the pages of that chapter. On a more subjective note, I found Packt Publishing's use of four different font sizes within the table of contents — no doubt intended to make higher level section names stand out — to actually reduce speed of scanning and comprehension, just as it does on Web pages that have half a dozen or more font sizes on a single page. The practice is not limited to this particular title, but appears to be standard in their lineup of books. In addition, the longer subheads are shown in such a thick and compressed font face as to be quite difficult to read, e.g., on page 239.

Throughout his book, the author's writing style is generally clear and approachable, though occasionally choppy. His background in technical instruction is exemplified by his logical, step-by-step explanations. Some readers may find this style too repetitive, such as the many mini-summaries — labeled "What just happened?" — scattered throughout the book. These are unnecessary, waste space, and could be excised. One instance of pedantry (on page 105) deserves special recognition/ribbing: "Yes and No are self-explanatory."

But all of these aforementioned flaws are relatively minor — particularly to the reader anxious to put up a new online storefront with minimum delay. Magento: Beginner's Guide is a detailed and lucid introduction to an e-commerce system quickly growing in favor.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Magento: Beginner's Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "The shopping cart systems that power online stores have evolved from simple homebrew solutions in the CGI era to far more powerful open source packages, such as osCommerce. But even the later systems are frequently criticized as suffering from poorly-written code and inadequate documentation — as well as for being difficult to install and administer, and nearly impossible to enhance with new functionality and improved site styling, at least without hiring outside help. These problems alone would explain the rapidly growing interest in the latest generation of shopping cart systems, such as Magento, purported to be outpacing all others in adoption. In turn, technical publishers are making available books to help developers and site owners get started with this e-commerce alternative, such as Magento: Beginner's Guide, written by William Rice." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Magento: Beginner's Guide author William Rice pages 300 publisher Packt Publishing rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1847195944 summary A starter guide to this popular e-commerce shopping cart. This title was published on 15 April 2009 by Packt Publishing, under the ISBN 978-1847195944. The firm makes available a Web page dedicated to the book, where visitors can find information on how to purchase the print or PDF versions of the book (or both as a bundle, at substantial savings). The site also has a link labeled "Code download" (even though there isn't any downloadable code), another link for viewing any errata (of which there is one reported, as of this writing), and a link for downloading a sample chapter (the third one, "Categories and Attributes").

The bulk of the book's 300 pages are organized into eleven chapters, which are intended to take the reader through the basic topics, in the same order they might be encountered by anyone developing a Magento-based store for the first time: an introduction; Magento system requirements and installation; product categories and attributes; tax rules; adding product information; site styling; advanced product functionality; CRM; payment processing; shipping configuration; and order fulfillment. These chapters are followed by an appendix that delineates, as numbered lists, all of the steps covered in greater detail in the chapters. The book concludes with an index whose value is immediately brought into question by the "products" entry, which presumably would be one of the most lengthy sections for an e-commerce book such as this one, yet contains only two entries, and neither one has a page number.

The book's first chapter begins by stating what Magento and the book offer, which were already covered in the preface. The author then introduces the demo store (an online vendor of coffee beans) to be used throughout the book, with screenshots. Readers can skip over this chapter, without missing anything of importance. This chapter, like all that follow, concludes with a summary, which adds no value to the book.

In Chapter 2, the author patiently steps the non-technical user through each phase of installing Magento on a Web server, with an emphasis upon Linux systems, which apparently are far less problematic for Magento than using a Windows-based hosting account (imagine that). PHP novices will likely appreciate the author's tip on how to use phpinfo() to see their server settings, but should be warned to delete that file so hackers cannot also stumble upon that information. Also, there are some technical inaccuracies in the author's discussion of search engine friendly URLs. In step 1 of the installation, he should have explained why he chose the Full Release and not the Downloader. On page 31, he instructs the reader to set some Magento files to permissions of 777, even though the previous page stated that his Web hosts' control panel does not allow that setting. Some readers may be confused by this, and should be advised to use their FTP programs for accomplishing this task, if their control panel has the same limitation. In step 3, the author could have provided some guidance as to what the reader can do if Magento refuses to proceed with the installation and provides no error messages, even though the database information is valid and confirmable by logging in at the command line. Of course, it is difficult to anticipate all the possible problems that a user may encounter. Even the official Magento documentation does not appear to address this particular issue. Lastly, the checklist at the end of the chapter, which specifies four items to confirm prior to installation, obviously should have been presented at the beginning of the chapter.

In the third chapter, the author explores some key concepts needed in working with Magento: products, categories, and attributes. Throughout the book, these three common terms — and later, "shopping cart," "payment gateways," etc. — are presented in title case, as if they were proper names, which they are not. Within the text, this formatting gives them the appearance of menu or page names, which quickly becomes annoying. A glaring example of this is section 16 on page 59. On the same page, the reader will encounter a rather cryptic heading, "Have a go hero." Nonetheless, readers should find the topic coverage to be quite useful, including tips on enabling a product navigation menu, optimizing categories, entering products, creating product images, and setting attributes. The next two chapters explain how to apply taxes to customer purchases, and how to add "simple products" (those without customer-changeable attributes), respectively. At first glance, one might conclude that Chapter 5 should immediately follow Chapter 3 — or be combined into one chapter — since both deal primarily with products. But within Magento, tax rules are a prerequisite for properly creating new products in one's store, so the chosen order makes sense.

The author shifts gears with the sixth chapter, which explores basic styling, i.e., customizing the appearance of a Magento-based storefront. The majority of the changes can be accomplished easily by the reader, because most of them are made within the Magento administrative area, and not through any involved editing of the CSS files of the default theme. Chapter 7 covers the topics of related products, grouped products, and configurable products — and thus clearly should have followed Chapter 5. Regardless, the author's use of illustrative examples, in creating the demo site, is quite helpful for the reader to see how to use each dialog box in the process of creating the various types of products.

The last four chapters of Magento: Beginner's Guide address four essential aspects of building and running an online store, beyond the products themselves: Chapter 8 is fairly brief, but explains how to configure a store's e-mail addresses and contact form (but not how to customize the e-mail templates), as well as the functionality made available by Magento for administering customers once they have become registered users on the store site. The subsequent chapter shows how to set up a Magento site to accept customer payments using PayPal, Authorize.Net, and other electronic payment options. Chapter 10 explains how to configure the various shipping options within Magento, and, like the previous chapter, focuses on trade-offs among the various options rather than the details of how to complete each dialog box. Confusingly, on page 219, the author states that you can charge a handling fee with the flat rate method, but four pages earlier states the exact opposite. The last chapter in the book covers the various phases of order fulfillment, as well as order management.

Despite the value of the book's contents, the material would have benefited from some proper editing, evidenced alone by the many errata: "freelance[r]" (on the "About the reviewer" page), "[and] so" (page 2), "distinguishes" (page 3), "top[-]two" (page 10), "Paypal" (page 11), "Card(saved)" (page 11), "php" (page 13), "reading and article" (page 17), "you web host" (page 27), "/single-origin-coffees" is missing (page 55), "Attribute[']s Model" (page 73), "Add New [Attribute] Set" (page 75), "answer[s]" (page 78), "zip codes" (pages 85-86, and others), "characters;" (should be a comma; page 104), "later [in the] book" (page 131), "discuss about" (page 131), "direct[ion] replacement" (page 133), "graphics;" (should be a comma; page 138), "tab. to" (page 141), "2@ brew..." (page 182), "can sit[e]" (page 190), "such [as] Visa" (page 195), and "Shopping Card" (page 197). Some of these errata are likely not attributable to the author, but instead introduced during the production phase of publication. There are other indicators that quality control was lacking, such as an errant period tacked on to every "Chapter 5" in the page title, on all the pages of that chapter. On a more subjective note, I found Packt Publishing's use of four different font sizes within the table of contents — no doubt intended to make higher level section names stand out — to actually reduce speed of scanning and comprehension, just as it does on Web pages that have half a dozen or more font sizes on a single page. The practice is not limited to this particular title, but appears to be standard in their lineup of books. In addition, the longer subheads are shown in such a thick and compressed font face as to be quite difficult to read, e.g., on page 239.

Throughout his book, the author's writing style is generally clear and approachable, though occasionally choppy. His background in technical instruction is exemplified by his logical, step-by-step explanations. Some readers may find this style too repetitive, such as the many mini-summaries — labeled "What just happened?" — scattered throughout the book. These are unnecessary, waste space, and could be excised. One instance of pedantry (on page 105) deserves special recognition/ribbing: "Yes and No are self-explanatory."

But all of these aforementioned flaws are relatively minor — particularly to the reader anxious to put up a new online storefront with minimum delay. Magento: Beginner's Guide is a detailed and lucid introduction to an e-commerce system quickly growing in favor.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Magento: Beginner's Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Of the leading content management systems used by developers for creating websites, Drupal is highly regarded for many characteristics, including a much smaller initial footprint, compared to Joomla and other CMSs. Yet some developers find this a disadvantage as well, because one of the most common criticisms leveled against Drupal is its lack of built-in support for images and multimedia elements — thereby forcing new Drupal developers to choose from the thousands of contributed Drupal modules those that would be optimal for implementing their websites' multimedia functionality. Aaron Winborn's book Drupal Multimedia is intended as a guide to help such developers." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Drupal Multimedia author Aaron Winborn pages 264 publisher Packt Publishing rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1-847194-60-2 summary A guidebook for adding images, videos, and audio content to Drupal sites The book was put out by Packt Publishing on 30 October 2008, under the ISBN 978-1-847194-60-2. On the publisher's book page, visitors can learn more details about the book and its author, purchase the electronic or print editions of the book (or both, at a discount), download the sample source code, send feedback or questions to the publisher, read the book's table of contents, or download a sample chapter for free ("Third Party Video") in PDF format. As with all other Packt Publishing titles, the errata is annoyingly not available directly from the book page; instead the visitor must go to the general Packt Publishing support page, find the title in a lengthy drop-down list box, click a button, and finally click another link (the one that should have been on the book page from the start) — only to have the errata displayed in a pop-up window. Among all the technical book publishers, Packt's procedure for accessing errata is surely the most tedious, and one can only hope it will be improved in the future. As of this writing, only one erratum has been reported. It is listed as being on "page 0," but that instead should read "page 34" (an erratum in an erratum!). Speaking of online resources, one would expect the author's own site to have further information on the book, but there does not appear to be any there.

Drupal Multimedia is a fairly slender volume, at 264 pages, no doubt because it focuses on a limited subject area — implementing multimedia with some key contributed modules — as opposed to most of the recent spate of Drupal books, some of which try to cover every major aspect of the CMS. The material in Aaron Winborn's book is organized into eleven chapters, addressing most if not all of the key topics within the chosen subject area: Drupal basics; images, galleries, and slideshows; image theming and effects; third-party and local video; file management; audio nodes and fields; theming audio; and the future of multimedia in Drupal. The book concludes with a skimpy five-page index, which fails to contain such basic entries as Flash, FLV, SWF, sprites, star ratings, slideshows, and countless others. A robust index is especially critical for any technical book, such as this one, that divides related topics among multiple chapters, and has section and subsection names that in some cases are quite similar to one another and thus could be easily confused.

Because this book is geared more toward programmers new to Drupal, and not well-versed veterans, the first chapter — the second longest in the book — introduces the reader to the core concepts of Drupal (nodes, regions, blocks, themes, and modules — core and contributed) as well as two essential modules (CCK and Views). The explanations do not go into any great detail, but should be enough to give any Drupal newbie a head start. Nonetheless, readers may be confused by the screenshots on pages 16 through 19, which appear to be from Drupal 5. Also, the brief coverage of views arguments is inadequate, and needs to be beefed to be useful later in the book. For creating a new theme, the author advises copying wholesale an existing theme; instead, a sub-theme is a much better approach. Chapter 1 wraps up with a discussion of some basic concepts in Drupal theming, which makes puzzling the title of the section, "Advanced Theming." Speaking of themes, readers should note that when the author refers to "theming" an image or video, he means making the uploaded file display as content on the node's page (and not just exist as an attachment to that node).

For many programmers new to Drupal, the first hurdle they encounter is how to add an image to the content of a page or story — a seemingly trivial task that is built into most major CMSs — without writing HTML and hard coding the path of an image file they FTP-ed to the server. Drupal version 6 and presumably all prior versions, do not have native support for uploading and embedding in-line images. In his second chapter, the author explains how one can create image galleries, teaser thumbnails, and images embedded in content. However, in the discussion on page 45, some details are incorrect, such as the label for the "Save" button (three times) and the presence of the galleries drop-down list. Readers will undoubtedly be confused by two additional inaccuracies: There is no Navigation menu item for displaying the "image galleries" created by default, because initially the image_gallery view has no menu assigned in the Gallery page settings. Secondly, the gallery description is not shown on the gallery page; in fact, it is not even listed as an available view field. The section titled "Image Gallery Settings" suggests that the author may have been using an older version of the Image module. But this probably does not explain the erroneous statement on page 56, that "image nodes created with Image attach will automatically be marked as not published." The chapter concludes with an explanation of how to embed an image in content, using manually inserted image tags, or the ImageAssist module, optionally supplemented with a WYSIWYG HTML editor, such as TinyMCE. The fourth chapter looks at how to theme images, and discusses — it greatly varying levels of detail — style overriding, the Firebug Firefox extension, the Theme Developer module, image nodes, image-based rollover menus, sprites, light boxes, star ratings, slideshows, and various special effects: drop shadows, magnification, and watermarks.

The subsequent chapter — oddly titled "Developing for Images" — extends the discussion by showing how to insert images as fields utilizing ImageField and several supporting modules. One of those modules is referred to as "FileField Tokens" (page 70), but there is no such module; the author probably meant ImageField Tokens. Also extending the previously noted problem of non-Drupal 6 content, is the screenshot for "Display fields," on page 83, as well as the narrative, which appear to be pre-version 6. The latter half of the chapter delves into how to create galleries and slideshows (using views), user pictures, and images associated with taxonomy terms.

With Chapters 5 and 6, the author shifts attention to what is perhaps the second most commonly used type of multimedia on websites nowadays — video — with the former of those chapters devoted to third-party videos (such as content hosted on YouTube), while the latter chapter is devoted to "local video" (local in the sense of hosted on one's own remote Web server — not one's local development machine). The author demonstrates how to utilize a YouTube-hosted video, first using core Drupal modules only, then using the Embedded Video Field module. For using local video files, the author shows how to use the FileField module so the user can upload QuickTime video files. Unfortunately, the instructions on page 146 may prove confusing to beginners, since it is not entirely clear as to whether the later, more-detailed paragraphs are repeating earlier instructions, or specifying something new. More significantly, the use of the FileField module necessitates writing theme PHP code, just to have the video display on the page — which less technical readers may not feel comfortable attempting on their sites. The second part of the chapter may be more useful to the typical reader, because it covers how to embed Flash videos, a more popular format. The author advocates the use of the jQuery Media module (which he created) in conjunction with the jQ module. Unfortunately for the reader, the details of implementing this approach are glossed over at the end of the chapter, with only meager instructions ("... add .node .content a to the classes."), and without any illustrative example. No explanation is provided as to why this particular JavaScript-dependent solution is recommended, as opposed to a more straightforward one, such as the Flash Node module — which is far less problematic for FLV files. (By the way, the author states that he and some other developers are creating a fully GPL media player module and that there is a development version available of this Media Player module. But there is no such version on that page, and the situation may never change, because the project appears to have fizzled in August 2008, judging by the comments on the Drupal.org site and the author's site.)

In written tutorials, videocasts, and other discussions of Drupal multimedia, one important area that is often neglected is asset management. This includes such seemingly mundane matters as where in a Drupal site's file system one should place plug-in files and even the uploaded multimedia files themselves. A more far-reaching topic is how to best associate multimedia assets with nodes so they can be accessed by various modules — for instance, as stand-alone content types versus CCK fields. Chapter 7 examines some of these topics, first discussing how to create and theme nodes whose associated videos can be used elsewhere on a site, such as in a gallery — using the Embedded Media Field and Node Reference modules. However, some readers may become frustrated because a couple critical steps are skipped, and, even worse, no guidance is provided as to how to make the video show up on a node reference content page, or what content provider selection to use (since "Local" is not an option). Next the author considers how to set access to videos by user role — using the Asset module. Unfortunately, the reader is apparently not shown how to do anything useful with video content uploaded and managed using the Asset module, including the scenario proposed at the beginning of the section. (Incidentally, one might assume that the author's solution would use the Asset Embedded Media submodule, but it is not compatible with the latest version of Drupal 6.) The Media Mover module, and its many submodules, offer an alternate method of video asset management, and the author shows how to e-mail a video from a mobile phone, to be automatically attached to a new blog post. The chapter concludes with a brief look at Kaltura, an open-source platform for storing and editing multimedia.

Some Web developers and end-users may consider online audio as the poor cousin of video. In truth, audio-only content plays a key role in many Web applications — from podcasts embedded in RSS feeds, to sample tracks on music sellers' websites. The subsequent three chapters of the book are devoted to managing audio content within Drupal using several resources and solutions — specifically, the Audio, getID3, FileField, jQuery Media, Embedded Media Field, XSPF Playlist, and Views modules

In the last chapter, titled "The Future of Drupal Multimedia," the author speculates as to what media-related capabilities he thinks we will likely find in Drupal 7 and beyond — such as native file handling (via hook_file) and multimedia support in core Drupal, the merging or deprecation of non-FileField modules, dissociation of data from nodes, improved module interfaces and usability, embeddable widgets (for data distribution), semantic multimedia (microformats, RDF, and taxonomy-powered tagging), mobile Web access, virtual reality (such as Second Life), tactile and olfactory media, and motion sensing (such as the Wii Remote controller).

One laudable feature of this book is the inclusion of numerous screenshots, which can be quite reassuring to a reader getting lost in the technical minutia of any particular recipe. Also helpful is the manner in which the author, for the most part, keeps the reader informed as to all configuration settings — and where to find them within the Drupal administration interface — that the reader must or may want to modify, depending on his or her needs. Technical books that fail to do this can be extremely frustrating to anyone trying to learn a nontrivial technology.

Yet there are some major flaws with the book: Far too much of the material suggests that the author was using Drupal 5. Aside from the screenshots mentioned earlier, sections of the text point in that direction, such as the statement, "The multiple image issue might be taken care of by Drupal 6" (page 56). Fortunately, none of these gaffes prevent the reader from learning how to perform the tasks using version 6. The second and more important flaw is the poor coverage of Flash content, as detailed above. A follow-up edition to the book, in which all of these problems are resolved, would be most welcome and valuable.

A revision would also be an opportunity to fix the grammatical errors that should have been caught in the proofreading process. For instance, the fourth complete sentence on page 11, is missing a verb. Errata include "Autrhor" (credits page), "you [have] learned" (page 2), ". you'll" (page 2), a ")" without a "(" to match it (page 17), "isin" (page 31), "it [is] installed" (page 32), "provide files" (page 33; should instead read "provide functions"), "hierarchal" (page 46), "formated" (page 57), "[the] FTP" (page 75), "menu — By" (page 117), "going a view" (page 119), "quicktime" (page 146), and "[Submit] Audio" (page 179). In addition, there are eight pairs of adjacent words missing their separating spaces — five on page 159, and three more on page 174.

As seen in many other Packt Publishing titles, this one contains excessive usage of inappropriate title case (e.g., several on page 8 and 9 alone), though occasionally title case is neglected (e.g., "Image attach" throughout the book). In addition, some of the phrasing is rather awkward, which may pose no barrier to a reader who already understands the particular idea being discussed in the text, but could prove a real detriment to anyone unfamiliar with that idea. For instance, on page 36, the author states that "Often you may wish to override a theme that is not provided as a file in the default theme." But no theme is contained within a single file, and one does not override themes anyway; rather, one can disable a theme, or modify a copy of it, or create a variation as a sub-theme.

Yet overall, this book's strengths outweigh its weaknesses. For Drupal developers who wish to add image, audio, and video content to their sites, Drupal Multimedia is a useful resource with which to begin.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Drupal Multimedia from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Of the leading content management systems used by developers for creating websites, Drupal is highly regarded for many characteristics, including a much smaller initial footprint, compared to Joomla and other CMSs. Yet some developers find this a disadvantage as well, because one of the most common criticisms leveled against Drupal is its lack of built-in support for images and multimedia elements — thereby forcing new Drupal developers to choose from the thousands of contributed Drupal modules those that would be optimal for implementing their websites' multimedia functionality. Aaron Winborn's book Drupal Multimedia is intended as a guide to help such developers." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Drupal Multimedia author Aaron Winborn pages 264 publisher Packt Publishing rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1-847194-60-2 summary A guidebook for adding images, videos, and audio content to Drupal sites The book was put out by Packt Publishing on 30 October 2008, under the ISBN 978-1-847194-60-2. On the publisher's book page, visitors can learn more details about the book and its author, purchase the electronic or print editions of the book (or both, at a discount), download the sample source code, send feedback or questions to the publisher, read the book's table of contents, or download a sample chapter for free ("Third Party Video") in PDF format. As with all other Packt Publishing titles, the errata is annoyingly not available directly from the book page; instead the visitor must go to the general Packt Publishing support page, find the title in a lengthy drop-down list box, click a button, and finally click another link (the one that should have been on the book page from the start) — only to have the errata displayed in a pop-up window. Among all the technical book publishers, Packt's procedure for accessing errata is surely the most tedious, and one can only hope it will be improved in the future. As of this writing, only one erratum has been reported. It is listed as being on "page 0," but that instead should read "page 34" (an erratum in an erratum!). Speaking of online resources, one would expect the author's own site to have further information on the book, but there does not appear to be any there.

Drupal Multimedia is a fairly slender volume, at 264 pages, no doubt because it focuses on a limited subject area — implementing multimedia with some key contributed modules — as opposed to most of the recent spate of Drupal books, some of which try to cover every major aspect of the CMS. The material in Aaron Winborn's book is organized into eleven chapters, addressing most if not all of the key topics within the chosen subject area: Drupal basics; images, galleries, and slideshows; image theming and effects; third-party and local video; file management; audio nodes and fields; theming audio; and the future of multimedia in Drupal. The book concludes with a skimpy five-page index, which fails to contain such basic entries as Flash, FLV, SWF, sprites, star ratings, slideshows, and countless others. A robust index is especially critical for any technical book, such as this one, that divides related topics among multiple chapters, and has section and subsection names that in some cases are quite similar to one another and thus could be easily confused.

Because this book is geared more toward programmers new to Drupal, and not well-versed veterans, the first chapter — the second longest in the book — introduces the reader to the core concepts of Drupal (nodes, regions, blocks, themes, and modules — core and contributed) as well as two essential modules (CCK and Views). The explanations do not go into any great detail, but should be enough to give any Drupal newbie a head start. Nonetheless, readers may be confused by the screenshots on pages 16 through 19, which appear to be from Drupal 5. Also, the brief coverage of views arguments is inadequate, and needs to be beefed to be useful later in the book. For creating a new theme, the author advises copying wholesale an existing theme; instead, a sub-theme is a much better approach. Chapter 1 wraps up with a discussion of some basic concepts in Drupal theming, which makes puzzling the title of the section, "Advanced Theming." Speaking of themes, readers should note that when the author refers to "theming" an image or video, he means making the uploaded file display as content on the node's page (and not just exist as an attachment to that node).

For many programmers new to Drupal, the first hurdle they encounter is how to add an image to the content of a page or story — a seemingly trivial task that is built into most major CMSs — without writing HTML and hard coding the path of an image file they FTP-ed to the server. Drupal version 6 and presumably all prior versions, do not have native support for uploading and embedding in-line images. In his second chapter, the author explains how one can create image galleries, teaser thumbnails, and images embedded in content. However, in the discussion on page 45, some details are incorrect, such as the label for the "Save" button (three times) and the presence of the galleries drop-down list. Readers will undoubtedly be confused by two additional inaccuracies: There is no Navigation menu item for displaying the "image galleries" created by default, because initially the image_gallery view has no menu assigned in the Gallery page settings. Secondly, the gallery description is not shown on the gallery page; in fact, it is not even listed as an available view field. The section titled "Image Gallery Settings" suggests that the author may have been using an older version of the Image module. But this probably does not explain the erroneous statement on page 56, that "image nodes created with Image attach will automatically be marked as not published." The chapter concludes with an explanation of how to embed an image in content, using manually inserted image tags, or the ImageAssist module, optionally supplemented with a WYSIWYG HTML editor, such as TinyMCE. The fourth chapter looks at how to theme images, and discusses — it greatly varying levels of detail — style overriding, the Firebug Firefox extension, the Theme Developer module, image nodes, image-based rollover menus, sprites, light boxes, star ratings, slideshows, and various special effects: drop shadows, magnification, and watermarks.

The subsequent chapter — oddly titled "Developing for Images" — extends the discussion by showing how to insert images as fields utilizing ImageField and several supporting modules. One of those modules is referred to as "FileField Tokens" (page 70), but there is no such module; the author probably meant ImageField Tokens. Also extending the previously noted problem of non-Drupal 6 content, is the screenshot for "Display fields," on page 83, as well as the narrative, which appear to be pre-version 6. The latter half of the chapter delves into how to create galleries and slideshows (using views), user pictures, and images associated with taxonomy terms.

With Chapters 5 and 6, the author shifts attention to what is perhaps the second most commonly used type of multimedia on websites nowadays — video — with the former of those chapters devoted to third-party videos (such as content hosted on YouTube), while the latter chapter is devoted to "local video" (local in the sense of hosted on one's own remote Web server — not one's local development machine). The author demonstrates how to utilize a YouTube-hosted video, first using core Drupal modules only, then using the Embedded Video Field module. For using local video files, the author shows how to use the FileField module so the user can upload QuickTime video files. Unfortunately, the instructions on page 146 may prove confusing to beginners, since it is not entirely clear as to whether the later, more-detailed paragraphs are repeating earlier instructions, or specifying something new. More significantly, the use of the FileField module necessitates writing theme PHP code, just to have the video display on the page — which less technical readers may not feel comfortable attempting on their sites. The second part of the chapter may be more useful to the typical reader, because it covers how to embed Flash videos, a more popular format. The author advocates the use of the jQuery Media module (which he created) in conjunction with the jQ module. Unfortunately for the reader, the details of implementing this approach are glossed over at the end of the chapter, with only meager instructions ("... add .node .content a to the classes."), and without any illustrative example. No explanation is provided as to why this particular JavaScript-dependent solution is recommended, as opposed to a more straightforward one, such as the Flash Node module — which is far less problematic for FLV files. (By the way, the author states that he and some other developers are creating a fully GPL media player module and that there is a development version available of this Media Player module. But there is no such version on that page, and the situation may never change, because the project appears to have fizzled in August 2008, judging by the comments on the Drupal.org site and the author's site.)

In written tutorials, videocasts, and other discussions of Drupal multimedia, one important area that is often neglected is asset management. This includes such seemingly mundane matters as where in a Drupal site's file system one should place plug-in files and even the uploaded multimedia files themselves. A more far-reaching topic is how to best associate multimedia assets with nodes so they can be accessed by various modules — for instance, as stand-alone content types versus CCK fields. Chapter 7 examines some of these topics, first discussing how to create and theme nodes whose associated videos can be used elsewhere on a site, such as in a gallery — using the Embedded Media Field and Node Reference modules. However, some readers may become frustrated because a couple critical steps are skipped, and, even worse, no guidance is provided as to how to make the video show up on a node reference content page, or what content provider selection to use (since "Local" is not an option). Next the author considers how to set access to videos by user role — using the Asset module. Unfortunately, the reader is apparently not shown how to do anything useful with video content uploaded and managed using the Asset module, including the scenario proposed at the beginning of the section. (Incidentally, one might assume that the author's solution would use the Asset Embedded Media submodule, but it is not compatible with the latest version of Drupal 6.) The Media Mover module, and its many submodules, offer an alternate method of video asset management, and the author shows how to e-mail a video from a mobile phone, to be automatically attached to a new blog post. The chapter concludes with a brief look at Kaltura, an open-source platform for storing and editing multimedia.

Some Web developers and end-users may consider online audio as the poor cousin of video. In truth, audio-only content plays a key role in many Web applications — from podcasts embedded in RSS feeds, to sample tracks on music sellers' websites. The subsequent three chapters of the book are devoted to managing audio content within Drupal using several resources and solutions — specifically, the Audio, getID3, FileField, jQuery Media, Embedded Media Field, XSPF Playlist, and Views modules

In the last chapter, titled "The Future of Drupal Multimedia," the author speculates as to what media-related capabilities he thinks we will likely find in Drupal 7 and beyond — such as native file handling (via hook_file) and multimedia support in core Drupal, the merging or deprecation of non-FileField modules, dissociation of data from nodes, improved module interfaces and usability, embeddable widgets (for data distribution), semantic multimedia (microformats, RDF, and taxonomy-powered tagging), mobile Web access, virtual reality (such as Second Life), tactile and olfactory media, and motion sensing (such as the Wii Remote controller).

One laudable feature of this book is the inclusion of numerous screenshots, which can be quite reassuring to a reader getting lost in the technical minutia of any particular recipe. Also helpful is the manner in which the author, for the most part, keeps the reader informed as to all configuration settings — and where to find them within the Drupal administration interface — that the reader must or may want to modify, depending on his or her needs. Technical books that fail to do this can be extremely frustrating to anyone trying to learn a nontrivial technology.

Yet there are some major flaws with the book: Far too much of the material suggests that the author was using Drupal 5. Aside from the screenshots mentioned earlier, sections of the text point in that direction, such as the statement, "The multiple image issue might be taken care of by Drupal 6" (page 56). Fortunately, none of these gaffes prevent the reader from learning how to perform the tasks using version 6. The second and more important flaw is the poor coverage of Flash content, as detailed above. A follow-up edition to the book, in which all of these problems are resolved, would be most welcome and valuable.

A revision would also be an opportunity to fix the grammatical errors that should have been caught in the proofreading process. For instance, the fourth complete sentence on page 11, is missing a verb. Errata include "Autrhor" (credits page), "you [have] learned" (page 2), ". you'll" (page 2), a ")" without a "(" to match it (page 17), "isin" (page 31), "it [is] installed" (page 32), "provide files" (page 33; should instead read "provide functions"), "hierarchal" (page 46), "formated" (page 57), "[the] FTP" (page 75), "menu — By" (page 117), "going a view" (page 119), "quicktime" (page 146), and "[Submit] Audio" (page 179). In addition, there are eight pairs of adjacent words missing their separating spaces — five on page 159, and three more on page 174.

As seen in many other Packt Publishing titles, this one contains excessive usage of inappropriate title case (e.g., several on page 8 and 9 alone), though occasionally title case is neglected (e.g., "Image attach" throughout the book). In addition, some of the phrasing is rather awkward, which may pose no barrier to a reader who already understands the particular idea being discussed in the text, but could prove a real detriment to anyone unfamiliar with that idea. For instance, on page 36, the author states that "Often you may wish to override a theme that is not provided as a file in the default theme." But no theme is contained within a single file, and one does not override themes anyway; rather, one can disable a theme, or modify a copy of it, or create a variation as a sub-theme.

Yet overall, this book's strengths outweigh its weaknesses. For Drupal developers who wish to add image, audio, and video content to their sites, Drupal Multimedia is a useful resource with which to begin.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Drupal Multimedia from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "There are countless content management systems (CMSs) available for building websites, and they offer varying levels of built-in functionality. But once a site developer has successfully installed any given CMS, a critical form of help (or hindrance) is the CMS's documentation, which for some CMSs is quite impressive, and for others absolutely atrocious. Joomla is a powerful and popular choice for Web developers, but can be daunting to newbies confused by its non-intuitive menu structure and restrictive content hierarchy. The documentation for Joomla is frequently criticized, for various reasons, and that may largely account for the popularity of third-party books — such as Barrie M. North's Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, now in its second edition." Read on for the rest of Michael and Ethelyn's review. Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, 2nd Edition author Barrie M. North pages 480 publisher Prentice Hall rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross and Ethelyn Holmes ISBN 978-0137012312 summary A comprehensive introduction to creating sites using Joomla. The book was published by Prentice Hall, on 1 June 2009, under the ISBN 978-0137012312. Just as with its predecessor, this updated edition spans 480 pages, and the material is grouped into 12 chapters: an introduction to CMSs in general and Joomla in particular; downloading and installing Joomla; basic Joomla administration; content management using Joomla; menus and navigation; enhancing Joomla functionality with extensions, components, modules, plug-ins, and templates; creation of content via the back-end and front-end; attracting Web traffic using SEO, referrals, and other techniques; how to create pure CSS templates; and building example websites for a school, a restaurant, and a blog. The book wraps up with four appendices on getting assistance with any Joomla development hurdles; four separate Joomla case studies; an introduction to SEO concepts; and installing WampServer.

On the book's Web page, the publisher makes available a description of the book, excerpts from Amazon.com reviews, the table of contents, and a sample chapter — "Creating Pure CSS Templates in Joomla!" — as both an online article and as a downloadable PDF file. There are also links for purchasing the print version, and for reading the Safari Books online version.

In conjunction with the book, Prentice Hall has published a DVD training course, titled Fundamentals of Joomla!, under the ISBN 978-0137017812. It consists of 13 lessons, spanning more than nine hours of video instruction. The DVD includes a bonus chapter explaining how to set up a membership site, not covered in the print book. The DVD disc is accompanied by a 128-page book, which includes all of the PHP and CSS code used in the training, plus additional material. As of this writing, Barnes & Noble is selling Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, 2nd Edition and the video training course bundled together. Anyone purchasing the video course should be aware that Lesson #6 on the DVD has a compression problem, which causes a small lag between the audio and video streams. In response to this, Prentice Hall uploaded that particular lesson as a free download to the product's site, under the "Updates" tab. A multimedia training course such as this may be the ideal tool for someone who finds printed technical books to be rather dry, and prefers learning from audiovisual material.

In this review, we will be examining both the book and the DVD training course, as the two complement one another.

Barrie North is well regarded in the Joomla community, and for good reason. He frequently blogs about Joomla on the website of Compass Design, a consulting firm specializing in Joomla Web design and SEO. Joomla developers consider Compass Design's site a source for some of the most up-to-date information on the subject. Barrie also founded Joomlashack, a noted provider of Joomla templates and customization services. He has more than 15 years of Internet experience as a Web designer, plus over a decade of classroom teaching experience and curriculum development expertise. He consults on Web marketing, search engine optimization, usability, and standards compliance for Joomla. He's also a former member of the Joomla Design and Documentation Working Groups.

The title of his book's first chapter, "Content Management Systems and an Introduction to Joomla!," fairly describes what the reader will find. As a CMS, Joomla's primary function is to organize and present all the content stored in a site's database, avoiding the problems in the past of static HTML files. This chapter presents Joomla's out-of-the-box features and delineates its various parts, templates, and modules. The DVD mentioned above shows the differences between constructing an ordinary Web page with Dreamweaver and constructing one with Joomla. People who learn best visually should be pleased with this demonstration, as well as Barrie North's teaching approach. He holds one's attention with a friendly yet informative conversational style. This first chapter provides an in-depth tutorial that explains how Joomla displays its content articles, and how the developer can organize them into a hierarchical structure. It details how to plan and organize the content and user experience for the site. It also explains the hierarchy structure currently used in Joomla — sections and categories — and how to best structure content into them for small and large sites.

The second chapter, "Downloading and Installing Joomla!," gives the reader a very detailed explanation on how to get up and running with Joomla. It explains where one can find the most current Joomla files; how to unpack these files on a home computer or into a remote Web hosting account; how to use the Joomla Installation Wizard; and how one can support the Joomla project. Barrie states that the worst part of the Joomla installation process is setting up the MySQL database, and uploading all the files to a remote server. But for anyone who has performed those tasks with other software technologies, the process should not pose a problem.

Chapter 3, "Joomla! Administration Basics," shows how the power of the Joomla site administration system, despite its simplicity. Compared to such site administration systems as those for WebLogic and Oracle AS, Joomla's system is a piece of cake. Reader should find the DVD especially helpful during the presentation of the back-end, front-end, control panels, and menus — especially the demonstration and explanation of such topics as articles, the front page, sections, categories, and modules. Barrie also gives tips on how to import and export users to Joomla, and about language extensions.

The fourth chapter, "Content Is King: Organizing Your Content," is a substantial and key chapter for those building a site with Joomla. It delves into Joomla's so-called "managers": the Article Manager, Frontpage Manager, Section Manager, Category Manager, and Module Manager. The author explains how to organize content logically, and the role of components and modules. Someone new to Joomla could otherwise find the many components and modules confusing. Of course, one can play around with them, but it is much more efficient to learn what one is doing from an expert. He demonstrates the Custom HTML module very well, and in the DVD walks the viewer through the development of a site using it.

Creating menus and navigation in a CMS is often perplexing to the uninitiated, and that's the topic of Chapter 5. It covers how to work with menu items, and clears up the issue about how to get rid of the dreaded "Welcome to the Frontpage." It also gets into managing modules (as opposed to Chapter 4's managing module content). Barrie North states that menus are perhaps the core of a Joomla site. In a static HTML site, they merely serve as navigation; in a Joomla site, they not only serve that purpose, but also determine the layout of what a dynamic page will look like and what content will appear on that page when the visitor navigates to it. The relationships among menus, menu items, pages, and modules, are perhaps the most confusing aspect of Joomla. Newbies can find daunting why some menu content shows up in articles, and then how to get rid of it. In this chapter, the reader learns how to create a navigation scheme that works for a new site.

Chapter 6, "Extending Joomla!," explains why extensions are essential to any well-functioning Joomla site. Rare is the Joomla-powered website that has no additional functionality, beyond the basics. In the world of Joomla, the term "extension" collectively describes components, modules, plugins, and languages. There are many hundreds available, both free and commercially from third-party providers. This chapter covers the Joomla 1.5 core templates — Khepri, Milkyway, JA Purity, and Beez — as well as how to use third-party templates.

In Chapter 7, "Expanding Your Content: Articles and Editors," the author returns to the critical topic of content management — specifically, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing, and how it relates to the backend with what Joomla refers to as Managers, Administrators, and Super Administrators. Barrie North then examines how authors, editors, and publishers can manage content through the front-end, as well as how administrators can set various permissions through the Menu Managers. This is critical for the site developer who wants users to be able to update content in a controlled manner, without breaking other things (inadvertently or otherwise!). Quite useful is Joomla's "global checkout" feature, which allows only one user at a time the ability to lock and then edit articles, and, if necessary, fix problems with checked-out articles.

The most attractive and powerful Joomla site in the world will be useless without visitors. Chapter 8, "Getting Traffic to Your Site," benefits from the author's knowledge and experience in online marketing and search engine optimization. For instance, he explains why the developer should discourage clients who ask for Flash-heavy sites, because pages loaded down with Flash elements can discourage traffic, for various reasons. In the DVD training material, he presents a step-by-step process of bringing traffic to an example site, using Wordtracker and Google tools. He also shows how to use Google advertising tools such as AdWords and AdSense. Interestingly, Barrie North does not put too much stock in keywords and metadata, but rather emphasizes the use of page titles as traffic magnets. He argues in both the DVD and the book that while email blasts may be effective and popular marketing tools, they should be used with caution. He also covers how blogs are another useful method for bringing traffic to one's sites.

The final four chapters in the book are all hands-on application of concepts and lessons covered in the earlier part of the book — specifically, how to create pure CSS templates, and how to create the three sample sites (for a school, a restaurant, and a blog).

Appendix A provides information on getting help with Joomla. If one is interested in seeing how Joomla is used in the real world, then Appendix B should prove valuable, because it offers information on Joomla's usage for commercial and government websites. Appendix C provides a quick overview of search engine optimization. Appendix D goes into detail on WampServer installation, with corresponding illustrations.

The book contains some errata: "Cpanel" (pages 25, 27, and 289), and "add fee" (should read "ad fee"; page 218). Those errata were present in the first edition, and even pointed out to the publisher in an earlier review.

The book's material is organized so that the reader can utilize it as a tutorial, reading from cover to cover, or skim through and take what is needed at the moment. The introductory ideas in the earlier chapters are developed and built upon to help the reader understand more advanced concepts later on. The book can also be used as a reference. For instance, if the reader desires a quick overview of what newsletter extensions are available, Chapter 6 provides that information. Lastly, the appendices contain valuable extra information about various aspects of Joomla. The target audience does not have to understand PHP in order to read this book or work through the many examples. Each example is presented in a clear step-by-step fashion. If a reader were to implement all of the examples in her development environment, then she would gain the skills to be able to build a substantial website. The DVD has an extra chapter on building a membership site. If the reader would like to go into the business of creating Joomla templates, the author even has a chapter showing how to do just that.

Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, 2nd Edition is to be recommended, particularly when matched with the DVD training course. Together they form a valuable reference guide and self-teaching tool, for newbies as well as seasoned website developers.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer. Ethelyn Holmes is a software and website developer — primarily using Java / J2EE and Joomla.

You can purchase Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, 2nd Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "There are countless content management systems (CMSs) available for building websites, and they offer varying levels of built-in functionality. But once a site developer has successfully installed any given CMS, a critical form of help (or hindrance) is the CMS's documentation, which for some CMSs is quite impressive, and for others absolutely atrocious. Joomla is a powerful and popular choice for Web developers, but can be daunting to newbies confused by its non-intuitive menu structure and restrictive content hierarchy. The documentation for Joomla is frequently criticized, for various reasons, and that may largely account for the popularity of third-party books — such as Barrie M. North's Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, now in its second edition." Read on for the rest of Michael and Ethelyn's review. Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, 2nd Edition author Barrie M. North pages 480 publisher Prentice Hall rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross and Ethelyn Holmes ISBN 978-0137012312 summary A comprehensive introduction to creating sites using Joomla. The book was published by Prentice Hall, on 1 June 2009, under the ISBN 978-0137012312. Just as with its predecessor, this updated edition spans 480 pages, and the material is grouped into 12 chapters: an introduction to CMSs in general and Joomla in particular; downloading and installing Joomla; basic Joomla administration; content management using Joomla; menus and navigation; enhancing Joomla functionality with extensions, components, modules, plug-ins, and templates; creation of content via the back-end and front-end; attracting Web traffic using SEO, referrals, and other techniques; how to create pure CSS templates; and building example websites for a school, a restaurant, and a blog. The book wraps up with four appendices on getting assistance with any Joomla development hurdles; four separate Joomla case studies; an introduction to SEO concepts; and installing WampServer.

On the book's Web page, the publisher makes available a description of the book, excerpts from Amazon.com reviews, the table of contents, and a sample chapter — "Creating Pure CSS Templates in Joomla!" — as both an online article and as a downloadable PDF file. There are also links for purchasing the print version, and for reading the Safari Books online version.

In conjunction with the book, Prentice Hall has published a DVD training course, titled Fundamentals of Joomla!, under the ISBN 978-0137017812. It consists of 13 lessons, spanning more than nine hours of video instruction. The DVD includes a bonus chapter explaining how to set up a membership site, not covered in the print book. The DVD disc is accompanied by a 128-page book, which includes all of the PHP and CSS code used in the training, plus additional material. As of this writing, Barnes & Noble is selling Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, 2nd Edition and the video training course bundled together. Anyone purchasing the video course should be aware that Lesson #6 on the DVD has a compression problem, which causes a small lag between the audio and video streams. In response to this, Prentice Hall uploaded that particular lesson as a free download to the product's site, under the "Updates" tab. A multimedia training course such as this may be the ideal tool for someone who finds printed technical books to be rather dry, and prefers learning from audiovisual material.

In this review, we will be examining both the book and the DVD training course, as the two complement one another.

Barrie North is well regarded in the Joomla community, and for good reason. He frequently blogs about Joomla on the website of Compass Design, a consulting firm specializing in Joomla Web design and SEO. Joomla developers consider Compass Design's site a source for some of the most up-to-date information on the subject. Barrie also founded Joomlashack, a noted provider of Joomla templates and customization services. He has more than 15 years of Internet experience as a Web designer, plus over a decade of classroom teaching experience and curriculum development expertise. He consults on Web marketing, search engine optimization, usability, and standards compliance for Joomla. He's also a former member of the Joomla Design and Documentation Working Groups.

The title of his book's first chapter, "Content Management Systems and an Introduction to Joomla!," fairly describes what the reader will find. As a CMS, Joomla's primary function is to organize and present all the content stored in a site's database, avoiding the problems in the past of static HTML files. This chapter presents Joomla's out-of-the-box features and delineates its various parts, templates, and modules. The DVD mentioned above shows the differences between constructing an ordinary Web page with Dreamweaver and constructing one with Joomla. People who learn best visually should be pleased with this demonstration, as well as Barrie North's teaching approach. He holds one's attention with a friendly yet informative conversational style. This first chapter provides an in-depth tutorial that explains how Joomla displays its content articles, and how the developer can organize them into a hierarchical structure. It details how to plan and organize the content and user experience for the site. It also explains the hierarchy structure currently used in Joomla — sections and categories — and how to best structure content into them for small and large sites.

The second chapter, "Downloading and Installing Joomla!," gives the reader a very detailed explanation on how to get up and running with Joomla. It explains where one can find the most current Joomla files; how to unpack these files on a home computer or into a remote Web hosting account; how to use the Joomla Installation Wizard; and how one can support the Joomla project. Barrie states that the worst part of the Joomla installation process is setting up the MySQL database, and uploading all the files to a remote server. But for anyone who has performed those tasks with other software technologies, the process should not pose a problem.

Chapter 3, "Joomla! Administration Basics," shows how the power of the Joomla site administration system, despite its simplicity. Compared to such site administration systems as those for WebLogic and Oracle AS, Joomla's system is a piece of cake. Reader should find the DVD especially helpful during the presentation of the back-end, front-end, control panels, and menus — especially the demonstration and explanation of such topics as articles, the front page, sections, categories, and modules. Barrie also gives tips on how to import and export users to Joomla, and about language extensions.

The fourth chapter, "Content Is King: Organizing Your Content," is a substantial and key chapter for those building a site with Joomla. It delves into Joomla's so-called "managers": the Article Manager, Frontpage Manager, Section Manager, Category Manager, and Module Manager. The author explains how to organize content logically, and the role of components and modules. Someone new to Joomla could otherwise find the many components and modules confusing. Of course, one can play around with them, but it is much more efficient to learn what one is doing from an expert. He demonstrates the Custom HTML module very well, and in the DVD walks the viewer through the development of a site using it.

Creating menus and navigation in a CMS is often perplexing to the uninitiated, and that's the topic of Chapter 5. It covers how to work with menu items, and clears up the issue about how to get rid of the dreaded "Welcome to the Frontpage." It also gets into managing modules (as opposed to Chapter 4's managing module content). Barrie North states that menus are perhaps the core of a Joomla site. In a static HTML site, they merely serve as navigation; in a Joomla site, they not only serve that purpose, but also determine the layout of what a dynamic page will look like and what content will appear on that page when the visitor navigates to it. The relationships among menus, menu items, pages, and modules, are perhaps the most confusing aspect of Joomla. Newbies can find daunting why some menu content shows up in articles, and then how to get rid of it. In this chapter, the reader learns how to create a navigation scheme that works for a new site.

Chapter 6, "Extending Joomla!," explains why extensions are essential to any well-functioning Joomla site. Rare is the Joomla-powered website that has no additional functionality, beyond the basics. In the world of Joomla, the term "extension" collectively describes components, modules, plugins, and languages. There are many hundreds available, both free and commercially from third-party providers. This chapter covers the Joomla 1.5 core templates — Khepri, Milkyway, JA Purity, and Beez — as well as how to use third-party templates.

In Chapter 7, "Expanding Your Content: Articles and Editors," the author returns to the critical topic of content management — specifically, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing, and how it relates to the backend with what Joomla refers to as Managers, Administrators, and Super Administrators. Barrie North then examines how authors, editors, and publishers can manage content through the front-end, as well as how administrators can set various permissions through the Menu Managers. This is critical for the site developer who wants users to be able to update content in a controlled manner, without breaking other things (inadvertently or otherwise!). Quite useful is Joomla's "global checkout" feature, which allows only one user at a time the ability to lock and then edit articles, and, if necessary, fix problems with checked-out articles.

The most attractive and powerful Joomla site in the world will be useless without visitors. Chapter 8, "Getting Traffic to Your Site," benefits from the author's knowledge and experience in online marketing and search engine optimization. For instance, he explains why the developer should discourage clients who ask for Flash-heavy sites, because pages loaded down with Flash elements can discourage traffic, for various reasons. In the DVD training material, he presents a step-by-step process of bringing traffic to an example site, using Wordtracker and Google tools. He also shows how to use Google advertising tools such as AdWords and AdSense. Interestingly, Barrie North does not put too much stock in keywords and metadata, but rather emphasizes the use of page titles as traffic magnets. He argues in both the DVD and the book that while email blasts may be effective and popular marketing tools, they should be used with caution. He also covers how blogs are another useful method for bringing traffic to one's sites.

The final four chapters in the book are all hands-on application of concepts and lessons covered in the earlier part of the book — specifically, how to create pure CSS templates, and how to create the three sample sites (for a school, a restaurant, and a blog).

Appendix A provides information on getting help with Joomla. If one is interested in seeing how Joomla is used in the real world, then Appendix B should prove valuable, because it offers information on Joomla's usage for commercial and government websites. Appendix C provides a quick overview of search engine optimization. Appendix D goes into detail on WampServer installation, with corresponding illustrations.

The book contains some errata: "Cpanel" (pages 25, 27, and 289), and "add fee" (should read "ad fee"; page 218). Those errata were present in the first edition, and even pointed out to the publisher in an earlier review.

The book's material is organized so that the reader can utilize it as a tutorial, reading from cover to cover, or skim through and take what is needed at the moment. The introductory ideas in the earlier chapters are developed and built upon to help the reader understand more advanced concepts later on. The book can also be used as a reference. For instance, if the reader desires a quick overview of what newsletter extensions are available, Chapter 6 provides that information. Lastly, the appendices contain valuable extra information about various aspects of Joomla. The target audience does not have to understand PHP in order to read this book or work through the many examples. Each example is presented in a clear step-by-step fashion. If a reader were to implement all of the examples in her development environment, then she would gain the skills to be able to build a substantial website. The DVD has an extra chapter on building a membership site. If the reader would like to go into the business of creating Joomla templates, the author even has a chapter showing how to do just that.

Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, 2nd Edition is to be recommended, particularly when matched with the DVD training course. Together they form a valuable reference guide and self-teaching tool, for newbies as well as seasoned website developers.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer. Ethelyn Holmes is a software and website developer — primarily using Java / J2EE and Joomla.

You can purchase Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, 2nd Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Slow Web page loading can discourage visitors to a site more than any other problem, regardless of how attractive or feature-rich the given site might be. Consequently, many Web developers hope to achieve faster response times using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), since only portion(s) of an AJAX page need to be reloaded. But for many rich Internet applications (RIAs), such potential performance gains can be lost as a result of non-optimized JavaScript, graphics, and CSS files. Steve Souders — a Web performance expert previously at Yahoo and now with Google — addresses these topics in his second book, Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Even Faster Web Sites author Steve Souders pages 254 pages publisher O'Reilly Media rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0596522308 summary Advanced techniques for improving website performance. The book was published by O'Reilly Media on 18 June 2009, under the ISBN 978-0596522308. The publisher makes available a Web page, where visitors can purchase the print and electronic versions of the book (as well as a bundle of the two), read the book online as part of the Safari library service, and check the reported errata — comprising those confirmed by the author (of which there are currently two) and any unconfirmed errors (all six of which are valid, though the fifth one may be a coincidence). In a break with traditional practice among technical publishers nowadays, there is no sample chapter available, as of this writing.

In many ways, this second book is similar to Steve's previous one, High Performance Web Sites: It presents methods of enhancing the performance of websites, with a focus on client-side factors. It is fairly slender (this one is 254 pages), relative to most programming books nowadays, and the material is organized into 14 chapters. However, unlike its predecessor, Even Faster Web Sites emphasizes generally more advanced topics, such as script splitting, coupling, blocking, and chunking (which to non-developers may sound like a list of the more nefarious techniques in professional hockey). This second book also has employed a team approach to authorship, such that six of the chapters are written by contributing authors. In his preface, Steve notes that the 14 chapters are grouped into three broad areas: JavaScript performance (Chapters 1-7), network performance (Chapters 8-12), and browser performance (Chapters 13-14). The book concludes with an appendix in which he presents his favorite tools for performance analysis, organized into four types of applications: packet sniffers, Web development tools, performance analyzers, and some miscellaneous applications.

In the first chapter, "Understanding Ajax Performance," guest author Douglas Crockford briefly describe some of the key trade-offs and principles of optimizing applications, and how JavaScript now plays a pivotal role in that equation — as websites nowadays are designed to operate increasingly like desktop programs. On pages 2 and 3, he uses some figures to illustrate fixed versus variable overhead, and the dangers of attempting to optimize the wrong portions of one's code. By the way, the so-called "axes" are not axes, or even Cartesian grid lines, but simply levels. Aside from its choppy narrative style and a pointless religious reference in the first paragraph, the material serves as a thought-provoking springboard for what follows. Chapter 2, titled "Creating Responsive Web Applications," was written by Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, who discuss response times, user perception of them, techniques for measuring latency, browser threads, Web Workers, Google Gears, timers, and memory issues. The material is neatly explained, although Figure 2-2 is quite confusing; moreover, both of the figures on that page should not have been made Mac- and Firefox-specific.

In the subsequent four chapters, Steve dives into the critical topic of how to optimize the performance of JavaScript-heavy pages through better script content and organization — specifically, how and when to split up large scripts into smaller ones, how to load scripts without blocking one another or breaking dependencies within the code, and how to best in-line scripts, when called for. Each of the four chapters follows an effective methodology: The first author delineates a particular performance mistake made by even some of the most popular websites, with the statistics to back it up. He presents one or more solutions, including any relevant tools, again with waterfall charts illustrating how well the solutions work. Lastly, he explains any browser-specific issues, oftentimes with a handy chart showing which possible method would likely be optimal for the reader's given situation, such as expected browser choices in the site's target audience. When there are potential pitfalls, Steve points them out, with helpful workarounds. He generally provides enough example source code to allow any experienced developer to implement the proposed solutions. Unfortunately, the example code does not appear to be available for download from O'Reilly's website.

The discussion of JavaScript optimization is capped off by the seventh chapter, written by Nicholas C. Zakas, who explains variable scope within JavaScript code, the advantages of choosing local variables as much as possible, scope chain augmentation, the performance ramifications of the four major data types (literal values, variables, arrays, and objects), optimizing flow control statements, and string concatenation. He outlines what sorts of problems can cause the user's Web browser to freeze up, and the differing responses she would see depending upon her chosen browser. Nicholas concludes his chapter by explaining how to utilize timer code to force long-running scripts to yield, in order to avoid these problems. By the way, in Figures 7-2 and 7-3, the data point symbols need to be enlarged so as to be distinguishable; as it is, they are quite difficult to read. More importantly, on page 93, the sentence beginning "This makes array lookup ideal..." is either misworded or mistaken, since array lookup cannot be used for testing inclusion in ranges.

With the eighth chapter, the book shifts gears to focus on network considerations — namely, how to improve the site visitor's experience by optimizing the number of bytes that must be pushed down the wire. In "Scaling with Comet," Dylan Schiemann introduces an emerging set of techniques that Steve Souders describes as "an architecture that goes beyond Ajax to provide high-volume, low-latency communication for real-time applications such as chat and document collaboration" — specifically, by reducing the server-side resources per connection. In Chapter 9, Tony Gentilcore discusses a rather involved problem with using gzip compression — one that negatively impacts at least 15% of Internet users. Even though videos, podcasts, and other audiovisual files consume a lot of the Internet's bandwidth, images are still far more common on websites, and this alone is reason enough for Chapter 10, in which Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan explain how to reduce the size of image files without degrading visible quality. They compare the most popular image formats, and also explain alpha transparency and the use of sprites. The only clear improvement that could be made to their presentation is on page 157, where the phrase "named /favicon.ico that sits in the web root" should instead read something like "usually named favicon.ico," since a favicon can have any filename, and can be located anywhere in a site's directory structure.

The lead author returns in Chapter 11, in which he explains how to best divide resources among multiple domains (termed "sharding"). In the subsequent chapter, "Flushing the Document Early," Steve explores the approach of utilizing chunked encoding in order to begin rendering the Web page before its full contents have been downloaded to the browser. The third and final section of the book, devoted to Web browser performance, consists of two chapters, both of whose titles neatly summarize their contents: "Using Iframes Sparingly" and "Simplifying CSS Selectors." That last chapter contains some performance tips that even some of the most experienced CSS wizards may have never heard of before. As with most of the earlier chapters, the narrative tends to be stronger than the illustrations. For instance, Figure 14-5, a multiline chart, is quite misleading, because it appears to depict three values varying over time, when actually each of the ten x-axis coordinates represents a separate major website. A bar chart would obviously have been a much better choice.

Like any first edition of a technical book, this one contains a number of errata (aside from those mentioned earlier): In Figure 1-1, "iteration" is misspelled. On page 23, in the sentence beginning "Thus, if...," the term "was" should instead read "were." In Figures 7-1 and 7-4, the "Global object" box should not contain "num2." On page 95, in the phrase "the terminal condition evaluates to true," that instead should read "false." On page 147, in the sentence beginning "However, the same icon...," the "was" should instead read "were." On page 214, "Web-Pagetest. AOL" should instead read "Web-Pagetest, then AOL," because the first sentence is one long absolute phrase (i.e., lacking a finite noun and verb).

All of these defects can be easily corrected in future printings. What will probably need to wait for a second edition, are improvements to the figures that are in need of replacement or clarification. What the publisher can rectify immediately — should the author and O'Reilly choose to do so — would be to make all of the example source code available for download.

Even though this book is decidedly longer than High Performance Web Sites, and has many more contributing authors, it does not appear to contain as much actionable information as his predecessor — at least for small- to medium-sized websites, which probably make up the majority of all sites on the Web. Even though such methodologies as Comet, Doloto, and Web Workers appear impressive, one has to wonder just how many real-world websites can justify the development and maintenance costs of implementing them, and whether their overhead could easily outweigh any possible benefits. Naturally, these are the sorts of questions that are best answered through equally hard-nosed experimentation — as exemplified by Steve Souders's admirable emphasis upon proving what techniques really work.

Fortunately, none of this detracts from the application development and optimization knowledge presented in the book. With its no-nonsense analysis of Internet performance hurdles, and balanced recommendations of the most promising solutions, Even Faster Web Sites truly delivers on its title's promise to help Web developers wring even more speed out of their websites.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Even Faster Web Sites from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Slow Web page loading can discourage visitors to a site more than any other problem, regardless of how attractive or feature-rich the given site might be. Consequently, many Web developers hope to achieve faster response times using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), since only portion(s) of an AJAX page need to be reloaded. But for many rich Internet applications (RIAs), such potential performance gains can be lost as a result of non-optimized JavaScript, graphics, and CSS files. Steve Souders — a Web performance expert previously at Yahoo and now with Google — addresses these topics in his second book, Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Even Faster Web Sites author Steve Souders pages 254 pages publisher O'Reilly Media rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0596522308 summary Advanced techniques for improving website performance. The book was published by O'Reilly Media on 18 June 2009, under the ISBN 978-0596522308. The publisher makes available a Web page, where visitors can purchase the print and electronic versions of the book (as well as a bundle of the two), read the book online as part of the Safari library service, and check the reported errata — comprising those confirmed by the author (of which there are currently two) and any unconfirmed errors (all six of which are valid, though the fifth one may be a coincidence). In a break with traditional practice among technical publishers nowadays, there is no sample chapter available, as of this writing.

In many ways, this second book is similar to Steve's previous one, High Performance Web Sites: It presents methods of enhancing the performance of websites, with a focus on client-side factors. It is fairly slender (this one is 254 pages), relative to most programming books nowadays, and the material is organized into 14 chapters. However, unlike its predecessor, Even Faster Web Sites emphasizes generally more advanced topics, such as script splitting, coupling, blocking, and chunking (which to non-developers may sound like a list of the more nefarious techniques in professional hockey). This second book also has employed a team approach to authorship, such that six of the chapters are written by contributing authors. In his preface, Steve notes that the 14 chapters are grouped into three broad areas: JavaScript performance (Chapters 1-7), network performance (Chapters 8-12), and browser performance (Chapters 13-14). The book concludes with an appendix in which he presents his favorite tools for performance analysis, organized into four types of applications: packet sniffers, Web development tools, performance analyzers, and some miscellaneous applications.

In the first chapter, "Understanding Ajax Performance," guest author Douglas Crockford briefly describe some of the key trade-offs and principles of optimizing applications, and how JavaScript now plays a pivotal role in that equation — as websites nowadays are designed to operate increasingly like desktop programs. On pages 2 and 3, he uses some figures to illustrate fixed versus variable overhead, and the dangers of attempting to optimize the wrong portions of one's code. By the way, the so-called "axes" are not axes, or even Cartesian grid lines, but simply levels. Aside from its choppy narrative style and a pointless religious reference in the first paragraph, the material serves as a thought-provoking springboard for what follows. Chapter 2, titled "Creating Responsive Web Applications," was written by Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, who discuss response times, user perception of them, techniques for measuring latency, browser threads, Web Workers, Google Gears, timers, and memory issues. The material is neatly explained, although Figure 2-2 is quite confusing; moreover, both of the figures on that page should not have been made Mac- and Firefox-specific.

In the subsequent four chapters, Steve dives into the critical topic of how to optimize the performance of JavaScript-heavy pages through better script content and organization — specifically, how and when to split up large scripts into smaller ones, how to load scripts without blocking one another or breaking dependencies within the code, and how to best in-line scripts, when called for. Each of the four chapters follows an effective methodology: The first author delineates a particular performance mistake made by even some of the most popular websites, with the statistics to back it up. He presents one or more solutions, including any relevant tools, again with waterfall charts illustrating how well the solutions work. Lastly, he explains any browser-specific issues, oftentimes with a handy chart showing which possible method would likely be optimal for the reader's given situation, such as expected browser choices in the site's target audience. When there are potential pitfalls, Steve points them out, with helpful workarounds. He generally provides enough example source code to allow any experienced developer to implement the proposed solutions. Unfortunately, the example code does not appear to be available for download from O'Reilly's website.

The discussion of JavaScript optimization is capped off by the seventh chapter, written by Nicholas C. Zakas, who explains variable scope within JavaScript code, the advantages of choosing local variables as much as possible, scope chain augmentation, the performance ramifications of the four major data types (literal values, variables, arrays, and objects), optimizing flow control statements, and string concatenation. He outlines what sorts of problems can cause the user's Web browser to freeze up, and the differing responses she would see depending upon her chosen browser. Nicholas concludes his chapter by explaining how to utilize timer code to force long-running scripts to yield, in order to avoid these problems. By the way, in Figures 7-2 and 7-3, the data point symbols need to be enlarged so as to be distinguishable; as it is, they are quite difficult to read. More importantly, on page 93, the sentence beginning "This makes array lookup ideal..." is either misworded or mistaken, since array lookup cannot be used for testing inclusion in ranges.

With the eighth chapter, the book shifts gears to focus on network considerations — namely, how to improve the site visitor's experience by optimizing the number of bytes that must be pushed down the wire. In "Scaling with Comet," Dylan Schiemann introduces an emerging set of techniques that Steve Souders describes as "an architecture that goes beyond Ajax to provide high-volume, low-latency communication for real-time applications such as chat and document collaboration" — specifically, by reducing the server-side resources per connection. In Chapter 9, Tony Gentilcore discusses a rather involved problem with using gzip compression — one that negatively impacts at least 15% of Internet users. Even though videos, podcasts, and other audiovisual files consume a lot of the Internet's bandwidth, images are still far more common on websites, and this alone is reason enough for Chapter 10, in which Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan explain how to reduce the size of image files without degrading visible quality. They compare the most popular image formats, and also explain alpha transparency and the use of sprites. The only clear improvement that could be made to their presentation is on page 157, where the phrase "named /favicon.ico that sits in the web root" should instead read something like "usually named favicon.ico," since a favicon can have any filename, and can be located anywhere in a site's directory structure.

The lead author returns in Chapter 11, in which he explains how to best divide resources among multiple domains (termed "sharding"). In the subsequent chapter, "Flushing the Document Early," Steve explores the approach of utilizing chunked encoding in order to begin rendering the Web page before its full contents have been downloaded to the browser. The third and final section of the book, devoted to Web browser performance, consists of two chapters, both of whose titles neatly summarize their contents: "Using Iframes Sparingly" and "Simplifying CSS Selectors." That last chapter contains some performance tips that even some of the most experienced CSS wizards may have never heard of before. As with most of the earlier chapters, the narrative tends to be stronger than the illustrations. For instance, Figure 14-5, a multiline chart, is quite misleading, because it appears to depict three values varying over time, when actually each of the ten x-axis coordinates represents a separate major website. A bar chart would obviously have been a much better choice.

Like any first edition of a technical book, this one contains a number of errata (aside from those mentioned earlier): In Figure 1-1, "iteration" is misspelled. On page 23, in the sentence beginning "Thus, if...," the term "was" should instead read "were." In Figures 7-1 and 7-4, the "Global object" box should not contain "num2." On page 95, in the phrase "the terminal condition evaluates to true," that instead should read "false." On page 147, in the sentence beginning "However, the same icon...," the "was" should instead read "were." On page 214, "Web-Pagetest. AOL" should instead read "Web-Pagetest, then AOL," because the first sentence is one long absolute phrase (i.e., lacking a finite noun and verb).

All of these defects can be easily corrected in future printings. What will probably need to wait for a second edition, are improvements to the figures that are in need of replacement or clarification. What the publisher can rectify immediately — should the author and O'Reilly choose to do so — would be to make all of the example source code available for download.

Even though this book is decidedly longer than High Performance Web Sites, and has many more contributing authors, it does not appear to contain as much actionable information as his predecessor — at least for small- to medium-sized websites, which probably make up the majority of all sites on the Web. Even though such methodologies as Comet, Doloto, and Web Workers appear impressive, one has to wonder just how many real-world websites can justify the development and maintenance costs of implementing them, and whether their overhead could easily outweigh any possible benefits. Naturally, these are the sorts of questions that are best answered through equally hard-nosed experimentation — as exemplified by Steve Souders's admirable emphasis upon proving what techniques really work.

Fortunately, none of this detracts from the application development and optimization knowledge presented in the book. With its no-nonsense analysis of Internet performance hurdles, and balanced recommendations of the most promising solutions, Even Faster Web Sites truly delivers on its title's promise to help Web developers wring even more speed out of their websites.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Even Faster Web Sites from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the potential challengers to Apple's phenomenally popular iPhone, perhaps the one with the best prospects is Google's Android, which is not a mobile phone per se, but rather an open-source platform that the company encourages phone manufacturers to deploy in their own products. Similarly, Google encourages computer programmers to develop applications for the Android environment. But learning how to create such applications is daunting to the uninitiated, particularly for developers who have never before worked with the user interface controls, Web services, and other resources involved. A recently published book, Unlocking Android, is designed to help such developers." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. Unlocking Android author W. Frank Ableson, Charlie Collins, Robi Sen pages 416 pages publisher Manning Publications rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1933988672 summary A guide to developing applications for Google's Android. Unlocking Android was put out by Manning Publications on 28 May 2009, under the ISBN 978-1933988672. It was authored by W. Frank Ableson, Charlie Collins, and Robi Sen — all of whom have extensive experience in developing mobile software applications. The publisher's Web page makes available author biographies, descriptions of the book, all its ancillary parts (the foreword, preface, acknowledgments, table of contents, and index), a white paper on Android (oddly termed a "green paper"), and two sample chapters ("Targeting Android" and "Intents and services"). There is a link to download the source code from the Google Code site, organized by chapter. The Manning site also hosts a forum, where readers and the authors can discuss the book. As of this writing, there are 42 threads, comprising 120 messages. Lastly, the site has links to order both the print and electronic versions of the book. Note that purchasing the former automatically entitles one to a copy of the latter. Manning appears to be pioneering this approach to making e-books more readily available to customers, since every print copy now contains an insert with a list of codes that can be used to download a PDF copy of the book.

The book is ostensibly intended for Android beginners, even though it does contain enough detailed information to serve as a partial reference for more experienced developers. It is organized in a logical fashion, in three parts, starting with an overview of Android itself, both the technology and the organization behind it. Then the reader is introduced to the Android programming environment, along with its many components and capabilities. The book concludes with tutorial chapters that step the reader through creating a sample Android application and more. The material covers Android SDK 1.x. Since Android programs are written in Java, any reader fluent in that language will have a much easier time absorbing the ideas. However, the authors state that even non-Java programmers should be able to follow the examples, as long as they have knowledge of similar languages, such as C, C++, or C#. However, even a cursory glance at the code, by such a reader, would prove that Java knowledge is essential.

The first chapter — oddly named "Targeting Android" — introduces the platform, the organizations behind it, the mobile market as a whole, Android's features, how it differs from featured phones and smartphones, its open-source licenses, platform components, libraries, service managers, programming environment, and virtual terminal. Be warned that Figure 1.1 could be confusing to some readers, because it shows the layers of technology that compose the Android platform, but pictures them on the front of a mobile phone, showing a keypad, which makes the layers appear to be part of the actual user interface; the phone should be removed from the illustration, in a future edition. The chapter goes on to discuss booting and activating Android, as well as how to map applications to processes. Some readers anxious to get to the technical nitty-gritty, may become impatient when reading the first portion of this chapter, because it largely consists of introductory material. Yet this context can be helpful and interesting to people unfamiliar with the mobile phone market. (Articles and tutorials aimed at new mobile application developers, oftentimes assume that said developers are already extremely familiar with the rapidly changing mobile market.) In the later portion of the chapter, readers are shown a handful of code snippets, with some explanation as to what they are doing and how. In reading this material, the reader could be easily overwhelmed with all of the new terminology. One can only hope that the authors were not thinking that the typical reader would understand all of what is discussed, or be able to do anything with it. A canonical "Hello, world" program or something similar — with an explanation as to how to execute it — would have been a far more gentle introduction. By the way, the first few code snippets are poorly indented, and some of the method names are italicized, while others are not — with no mention as to what this might signify, either in the chapter or in the earlier "Code Conventions" section.

In Chapter 2, the reader is introduced to the key tools for basic Android development, including the SDK, Eclipse, and the Android Emulator. An example application — a tip calculator — is developed, step by step, to illustrate those tools. Clearly, this tutorial information should have been presented before the second section of the previous chapter. It nonetheless serves as a valuable introduction to programming Android. Incidentally, Figure 2.1 labels the development environment as being located on a laptop, incorrectly suggesting that desktop computers are not equally usable platforms. Later, when the authors suggest that readers add the Android SDK tools directory to their system search path, they specify only the release-independent directory (containing adb, for instance), and not the release-specific paths (containing aapt, which is the first tool discussed); readers presumably should add both. Also, the authors should specify which release to use, 1.1 or 1.5. The reader eventually is told how to run a sample application — and not a moment too soon, because at that point the reader is already 15 percent of the way into the book. To reach that point, she must wade through more introductory material than was needed, in addition to discussions of network speed and latency, command line tools, DDMS, Java packages, and other information. All of this could and should be covered later, when it would be much more meaningful, and the reader would have greater motivation to learn it, having seen an Android application running (if only in the emulator).

Part 2 forms the bulk of the book, consisting of nine chapters devoted to the essential aspects of Android application development: user interfaces, including the Activity class, views, resource types, and manifest files; Intent classes, broadcast receivers, task services, and inter-process communications; data storage and retrieval, including user preferences, files stored on the local system and on SD cards, databases, and the ContentProvider class; networking, including client/server interaction, HTTP, and Web services such as SOAP; telephony, including how to receive and initiate calls and SMS messages; notifications and alarms; generating graphics and animation; multimedia, including audio and video, utilizing the OpenCORE technology; location-based applications, using a variety of tools, including Google Earth's KML. All of these chapters make use of example applications, with annotated source code and screenshots of the applications running in the Android emulator.

The third and final part of the book comprises two chapters, each of which extends the core concepts of Android development. Chapter 12 steps the reader through the creation of a substantial application, named "Field Service Application," designed for mobile technicians who provide support services for customers of contracted clients. The application is designed to be used by both the technician and his home office to assign and manage job orders, capture customer signatures of completed jobs, order replacement parts, and receive navigation assistance. The final chapter, "Hacking Android," explores Android's utilization of Linux, the C programming language, and the SQLite database — as well as how the Android developer can access these capabilities under the hood.

Appendix A explains how to install the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE), the Android software development kit (SDK), and the ADT plug-in for Eclipse. Readers who do not already have those components installed on their computers, may want to first read the appendix and follow the procedures. Note, however, that the procedures given in section A.4, for installing the ADT plug-in, are already out of date — namely, for Eclipse version 3.3. In addition, the URL given by the authors ("https://dl-sll.google.com/android/eclipse") is invalid, because it is missing the trailing directory slash, which is necessary for it to work within Eclipse. (This points up the importance of including root directories in URLs, despite their common absence, because even though Web browsers will automatically correct this upon receiving an error message from the server, Eclipse evidently does not.) The online Android installation instructions are much more useful, because they also include the latest version of Eclipse, 3.4.

As is to be expected with the first edition of any detailed computer programming book, this one contains some errata — for instance, in the first portion of the book alone: "Android[']s" (page xxii, twice), "Webkit" (page 7, in the caption), "SQLite[,] an" (page 11), and "byte code[s]" (page 13). Also, terms such as "Internet" and "Web" are in all-lowercase, throughout the book, even though they are proper names. (In our world of instant messaging and Twitter, grammatical degeneration continues apace.) For any reader who wishes to follow along and implement the sample projects, possibly the most disappointing decision by the authors was that of offering the sample code not as a single archive file, or even individual archive files for each of the 13 chapters. Instead, the reader must tediously click through multiple layers of directories, just to get the code displayed in a browser, one file at a time. Readers are advised to employee a Web copying utility, which, given a starting URL, will try to download all of the linked pages, recursively, and store those Web pages and other Web elements on their own computer (even localizing links, to retain working navigation in the saved pages).

Yet by far the biggest problem with this book, is that while it claims to be an introductory text, suitable for someone completely unfamiliar with Android, it does not bring the newcomer up to speed at a reasonable pace for learning. Instead, it presents a large number of code snippets and tools to the reader, without adequate explanation for the beginner to truly understand what is happening. This pattern begins even in the first chapter, which is sorely lacking a tutorial on how to execute the sample code — to better understand it and perhaps modify it (a practice that most programmers find quite valuable for assimilating a new technology). On page 23 is a frustratingly brief sidebar on testing the receipt of an SMS message, that is far from adequate for the reader anxious to begin testing out this new material. The second chapter continues this unfortunate tendency of describing tools prior to giving the reader enough information to run those tools themselves in the same manner, and see the same results. For instance, on page 41, the authors show how to use the adb tool to connect to a running emulator session, but at that point the reader has no such sessions running. (Sometimes the authors of programming books understand the material quite well, but neglect to view it from the perspective of someone who does not yet have that understanding.)

While more appropriate for intermediate Android developers than claimed, Unlocking Android contains a wealth of information to help Java programmers begin developing mobile applications for Google's new platform, with numerous code snippets and screenshots.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Unlocking Android from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the potential challengers to Apple's phenomenally popular iPhone, perhaps the one with the best prospects is Google's Android, which is not a mobile phone per se, but rather an open-source platform that the company encourages phone manufacturers to deploy in their own products. Similarly, Google encourages computer programmers to develop applications for the Android environment. But learning how to create such applications is daunting to the uninitiated, particularly for developers who have never before worked with the user interface controls, Web services, and other resources involved. A recently published book, Unlocking Android, is designed to help such developers." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. Unlocking Android author W. Frank Ableson, Charlie Collins, Robi Sen pages 416 pages publisher Manning Publications rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1933988672 summary A guide to developing applications for Google's Android. Unlocking Android was put out by Manning Publications on 28 May 2009, under the ISBN 978-1933988672. It was authored by W. Frank Ableson, Charlie Collins, and Robi Sen — all of whom have extensive experience in developing mobile software applications. The publisher's Web page makes available author biographies, descriptions of the book, all its ancillary parts (the foreword, preface, acknowledgments, table of contents, and index), a white paper on Android (oddly termed a "green paper"), and two sample chapters ("Targeting Android" and "Intents and services"). There is a link to download the source code from the Google Code site, organized by chapter. The Manning site also hosts a forum, where readers and the authors can discuss the book. As of this writing, there are 42 threads, comprising 120 messages. Lastly, the site has links to order both the print and electronic versions of the book. Note that purchasing the former automatically entitles one to a copy of the latter. Manning appears to be pioneering this approach to making e-books more readily available to customers, since every print copy now contains an insert with a list of codes that can be used to download a PDF copy of the book.

The book is ostensibly intended for Android beginners, even though it does contain enough detailed information to serve as a partial reference for more experienced developers. It is organized in a logical fashion, in three parts, starting with an overview of Android itself, both the technology and the organization behind it. Then the reader is introduced to the Android programming environment, along with its many components and capabilities. The book concludes with tutorial chapters that step the reader through creating a sample Android application and more. The material covers Android SDK 1.x. Since Android programs are written in Java, any reader fluent in that language will have a much easier time absorbing the ideas. However, the authors state that even non-Java programmers should be able to follow the examples, as long as they have knowledge of similar languages, such as C, C++, or C#. However, even a cursory glance at the code, by such a reader, would prove that Java knowledge is essential.

The first chapter — oddly named "Targeting Android" — introduces the platform, the organizations behind it, the mobile market as a whole, Android's features, how it differs from featured phones and smartphones, its open-source licenses, platform components, libraries, service managers, programming environment, and virtual terminal. Be warned that Figure 1.1 could be confusing to some readers, because it shows the layers of technology that compose the Android platform, but pictures them on the front of a mobile phone, showing a keypad, which makes the layers appear to be part of the actual user interface; the phone should be removed from the illustration, in a future edition. The chapter goes on to discuss booting and activating Android, as well as how to map applications to processes. Some readers anxious to get to the technical nitty-gritty, may become impatient when reading the first portion of this chapter, because it largely consists of introductory material. Yet this context can be helpful and interesting to people unfamiliar with the mobile phone market. (Articles and tutorials aimed at new mobile application developers, oftentimes assume that said developers are already extremely familiar with the rapidly changing mobile market.) In the later portion of the chapter, readers are shown a handful of code snippets, with some explanation as to what they are doing and how. In reading this material, the reader could be easily overwhelmed with all of the new terminology. One can only hope that the authors were not thinking that the typical reader would understand all of what is discussed, or be able to do anything with it. A canonical "Hello, world" program or something similar — with an explanation as to how to execute it — would have been a far more gentle introduction. By the way, the first few code snippets are poorly indented, and some of the method names are italicized, while others are not — with no mention as to what this might signify, either in the chapter or in the earlier "Code Conventions" section.

In Chapter 2, the reader is introduced to the key tools for basic Android development, including the SDK, Eclipse, and the Android Emulator. An example application — a tip calculator — is developed, step by step, to illustrate those tools. Clearly, this tutorial information should have been presented before the second section of the previous chapter. It nonetheless serves as a valuable introduction to programming Android. Incidentally, Figure 2.1 labels the development environment as being located on a laptop, incorrectly suggesting that desktop computers are not equally usable platforms. Later, when the authors suggest that readers add the Android SDK tools directory to their system search path, they specify only the release-independent directory (containing adb, for instance), and not the release-specific paths (containing aapt, which is the first tool discussed); readers presumably should add both. Also, the authors should specify which release to use, 1.1 or 1.5. The reader eventually is told how to run a sample application — and not a moment too soon, because at that point the reader is already 15 percent of the way into the book. To reach that point, she must wade through more introductory material than was needed, in addition to discussions of network speed and latency, command line tools, DDMS, Java packages, and other information. All of this could and should be covered later, when it would be much more meaningful, and the reader would have greater motivation to learn it, having seen an Android application running (if only in the emulator).

Part 2 forms the bulk of the book, consisting of nine chapters devoted to the essential aspects of Android application development: user interfaces, including the Activity class, views, resource types, and manifest files; Intent classes, broadcast receivers, task services, and inter-process communications; data storage and retrieval, including user preferences, files stored on the local system and on SD cards, databases, and the ContentProvider class; networking, including client/server interaction, HTTP, and Web services such as SOAP; telephony, including how to receive and initiate calls and SMS messages; notifications and alarms; generating graphics and animation; multimedia, including audio and video, utilizing the OpenCORE technology; location-based applications, using a variety of tools, including Google Earth's KML. All of these chapters make use of example applications, with annotated source code and screenshots of the applications running in the Android emulator.

The third and final part of the book comprises two chapters, each of which extends the core concepts of Android development. Chapter 12 steps the reader through the creation of a substantial application, named "Field Service Application," designed for mobile technicians who provide support services for customers of contracted clients. The application is designed to be used by both the technician and his home office to assign and manage job orders, capture customer signatures of completed jobs, order replacement parts, and receive navigation assistance. The final chapter, "Hacking Android," explores Android's utilization of Linux, the C programming language, and the SQLite database — as well as how the Android developer can access these capabilities under the hood.

Appendix A explains how to install the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE), the Android software development kit (SDK), and the ADT plug-in for Eclipse. Readers who do not already have those components installed on their computers, may want to first read the appendix and follow the procedures. Note, however, that the procedures given in section A.4, for installing the ADT plug-in, are already out of date — namely, for Eclipse version 3.3. In addition, the URL given by the authors ("https://dl-sll.google.com/android/eclipse") is invalid, because it is missing the trailing directory slash, which is necessary for it to work within Eclipse. (This points up the importance of including root directories in URLs, despite their common absence, because even though Web browsers will automatically correct this upon receiving an error message from the server, Eclipse evidently does not.) The online Android installation instructions are much more useful, because they also include the latest version of Eclipse, 3.4.

As is to be expected with the first edition of any detailed computer programming book, this one contains some errata — for instance, in the first portion of the book alone: "Android[']s" (page xxii, twice), "Webkit" (page 7, in the caption), "SQLite[,] an" (page 11), and "byte code[s]" (page 13). Also, terms such as "Internet" and "Web" are in all-lowercase, throughout the book, even though they are proper names. (In our world of instant messaging and Twitter, grammatical degeneration continues apace.) For any reader who wishes to follow along and implement the sample projects, possibly the most disappointing decision by the authors was that of offering the sample code not as a single archive file, or even individual archive files for each of the 13 chapters. Instead, the reader must tediously click through multiple layers of directories, just to get the code displayed in a browser, one file at a time. Readers are advised to employee a Web copying utility, which, given a starting URL, will try to download all of the linked pages, recursively, and store those Web pages and other Web elements on their own computer (even localizing links, to retain working navigation in the saved pages).

Yet by far the biggest problem with this book, is that while it claims to be an introductory text, suitable for someone completely unfamiliar with Android, it does not bring the newcomer up to speed at a reasonable pace for learning. Instead, it presents a large number of code snippets and tools to the reader, without adequate explanation for the beginner to truly understand what is happening. This pattern begins even in the first chapter, which is sorely lacking a tutorial on how to execute the sample code — to better understand it and perhaps modify it (a practice that most programmers find quite valuable for assimilating a new technology). On page 23 is a frustratingly brief sidebar on testing the receipt of an SMS message, that is far from adequate for the reader anxious to begin testing out this new material. The second chapter continues this unfortunate tendency of describing tools prior to giving the reader enough information to run those tools themselves in the same manner, and see the same results. For instance, on page 41, the authors show how to use the adb tool to connect to a running emulator session, but at that point the reader has no such sessions running. (Sometimes the authors of programming books understand the material quite well, but neglect to view it from the perspective of someone who does not yet have that understanding.)

While more appropriate for intermediate Android developers than claimed, Unlocking Android contains a wealth of information to help Java programmers begin developing mobile applications for Google's new platform, with numerous code snippets and screenshots.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Unlocking Android from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Among the more popular and better-regarded content management systems (CMSs), Drupal is distinguished partly by its building-block approach, in which a website's functionality is built up in pieces, each of which is a module (either core or contributed). The opposite approach — using far fewer but more encompassing modules — is generally preferred by non-developers who do not relish integrating a sizable collection of modules or trying to modify the underlying code. Nonetheless, anyone who wishes to build a Drupal-based social website, can learn how to do so in a new e-book titled Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide author Dorien Herremans pages 140 publisher Holistic Vibes rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-2839904902 summary How to create a Drupal community site using contrib modules. Published by Holistic Vibes Sàrl in 2009, the book was written by Dorien Herremans, an independent Web developer in Belgium who holds an MSc degree in MIS from the University of Antwerp, and has lectured in IT and 3D computer animation at Les Roches University of Applied Sciences, in Bluche, Switzerland. Her Drupal story is no doubt similar to that of many other Web developers: After building numerous sites in Drupal, she decided to create a new community site — in this case, Raw Vegan Dating. She was well aware that other CMSs offered fairly sophisticated modules that could be dropped into a fresh CMS installation, thereby creating a new community site instantly. But that approach generally requires one to accept the functional limitations of the chosen module, or start hacking the module's code (which for most modules is poorly written and equally poorly documented), with no guarantee that one's modifications will even work. Dorien instead opted for Drupal's flexibility, but found the development process rather difficult and time-consuming, partly because of some technical issues that arose: How can one easily create advanced profiles in Drupal? Can one add a photo gallery to each profile? Ultimately, these lead to a much broader question: Is it possible to build a feature-rich community/dating site using only core and contributed modules, without having to make any modifications to them?

Dorien set out to answer that question, in developing a new site, Drupal Fun, which is a community primarily for Drupal users who have read the book and wish to help each other. The site also offers a few tutorials on how to convert to the latest versions of modules. In making that site, Dorien utilized only available modules, with no changes, and documented each step in the process. The lessons learned from that effort form the foundation of Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide. The first three chapters constitute an introductory foundation; the next two cover user profiles; and the remaining four major chapters explain content, monetization, etc. For all topics, the Drupal Fun site is used as a case study. Even though the book focuses on Drupal version 6, and the example site is created using that version, the book does have notes on how to implement everything in version 5 as well.

In the book's introduction, the author provides a brief overview of Drupal, virtual communities, and her perspective on how to build one of the latter using the former. She states that it is easy to resort to custom modules — i.e., modules created or modified by oneself — but this contradicts one of the central tenets of the book, that a non-programmer would find it difficult if not impossible to go beyond already-available modules in building a community site (unless of course he were to outsource the development of the custom modules). In a footnote, it is incorrectly stated that "You can use the Drupal interface to write a module yourself" (page 4).

The second chapter, titled "Setting up the site," explains the desired functionality of the example site to be created (including the site's main goal, which redundantly was also presented at the end of the previous chapter). The author explains how to install Drupal on one's local Web server. A Windows-only developer may be confused by steps 2, 3, and 8, which are specific to Linux/Unix, but not labeled as such. The expression "hidden files" (page 10) would mean in Windows any files with their "hidden" attributes enabled. But in this case the author is probably referring to a single file, ".htaccess," in the Drupal root directory, because in *nix parlance a file is considered hidden if its name consists only of an extension (such a file is not shown in directory listings by default). The chapter concludes with several figures, which should have been interspersed throughout the earlier narrative.

Any reader following the book should at that point have a working copy of Drupal in his development environment. Chapter 3 explains some basic configuration settings for the newly-installed Drupal instance, as well as how to install modules and themes. However, some of the information is presented in a potentially confusing manner, such as on page 16 when an absolute directory path in one step, is immediately followed by what appears to be another absolute directory path in the next step ("/admin/build/modules"), but is actually meant to convey a navigation path within the Drupal user interface. For a book intended for Drupal newbies, it is essential to clarify technical issues such as this one, because otherwise readers can quickly become frustrated, wondering what the author is discussing and how to follow along in their own Drupal instances. Later, a favicon is described as residing "on the top of your browser window," but that would be the browser icon; rather, favicons are next to the browser's location field and in any relevant tabs. The author briefly describes more than half a dozen modules that arguably should be included in any Drupal site, including ones for dynamic menus, spam control, and task scheduling. Links to the modules' pages — in the text and/or as links in the PDF e-book — would have been quite helpful. The Tagadelic module is recommended for generating tag clouds, including a friendlier 404 error page, using the directory path "/tagadelic"; but Figure 3.5 shows the setting without that leading slash, and a quick test suggests that it does not work. More importantly for the newbie reader, there is no explanation as to how to start using tags. This chapter — like all that follow, except for the last — concludes with a list of contributed modules discussed in the respective chapter. Given that the chapters are short, and the modules' names easily stand out, these module lists add no value and could be removed in a future edition.

In Chapter 4, the reader learns how to use the Content Profile module for making highly functional and versatile user profiles that include photo and video galleries, avatars, contact forms, social networking, map locations, personal Web pages, AdSense revenue streams, and more. Most of the instructions are straightforward, but the discussion on how to implement avatars, on page 30, should have been fleshed out (no pun intended) — with more details as to exactly what settings to make, and where. Chapter 5 extends the previous topic, by demonstrating how to enhance the new user profile content type by implementing additional functionality: image and video galleries, a site member's location on a world map, member search, and featured members. In the next chapter, the author shows how to add more text-oriented content types, using the Views, Panels, and Fivestar modules.

While the first six chapters of the book focus on how to create functionality for users, the three chapters that follow examine how to create functionality for the online community itself. Chapter 7 discusses the details of adding forums, shout boxes, buddy lists, messages, subscriptions, a newsletter, user points, user status, user activity (think Twitter), and user groups. Chapter 8 explains how to utilize Google AdSense, affiliate programs, and donations — so that site owners and members can receive some sort of financial reward for their community-building efforts. Chapter 9 covers subjects that a site builder will encounter near the final stages of site development, such as finalizing the navigation menus, providing a post-registration page, supporting internationalization and localization, customizing system e-mail messages, tuning site performance, promoting a new site, tracking a site's popularity with analytics, performing module updates safely, backing up Drupal files and database, and duplicating a site.

Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide is wrapped up with a brief chapter, an author bio, and an unnecessary marketing description of the book. Unlike most programming books, this one is missing an index — although, as an e-book, it can be searched far easier than a print book.

The list price of the book is a very reasonable €7.70, and it is currently available for €5.50. Even though it is registered under the ISBN 978-2839904902, it is currently not available from Amazon.com, because it is an e-book, and the Amazon.com Kindle is not yet available in Europe; this apparently prohibits European publishers from using it. However, the book's website makes it possible to purchase it online. That site also has more details on the book's contents and the author. In addition to the book site, the first three chapters can be previewed online, via its Google Books listing.

Like any technical work, this one has its strengths and weaknesses. Sadly, the book is marred by generally sloppy writing, with a high ratio of errors to pages. There are several errata: "to[o] much" (pages 4 and 79), "others[']" (page 5), "look[s]" (page 16), "fig 3.3" (page 17; should read "Figure 3.1"), "Imagecache_actions Module" (page 52), "eld avatar" (page 66), "other then" (page 69), "others['] contact link" (page 94), "less then" (page 117), "Clustermaps" (page 124), and ."[my]sql file" (page 128). Also, there are many instances of awkward or incorrect phrasing, such as "harmonic" (page 2; should read "in harmony"), "Skippy balls" (page 3; hint: they have nothing to do with peanut butter), "expansive" (page 4; should read "extensible"), "6-versions" (page 9), "and a while" (page 20; should read "in awhile"), "brackets" (page 26; should read "parentheses"), "200% satisfied" (page 34), "Fixfertig" (page 76), "a grip out" (page 83), and "yourbranch" (page 112). Some of these may be European expressions, though Google suggests otherwise. There are missing commas and hyphens, some punctuation marks used incorrectly, and numerous sentences split at the coordinating conjunction into separate (incomplete) sentences. The use of case and spaces in proper names throughout the book are oftentimes incorrect, e.g., "MySql" (page 10 and others), "ftp" (page 10), "cleanURLs" (page 15), "phptemplate" (page 16), "Dhtml" (page 23), "tagadelic" (page 31), "html" (page 98), and "Paypal" (page 113, etc.). Most of the PHP snippets do not have any proper code indentation. Web accessibility proponents will cringe at the table-based positioning. The book's first "chapter" is really an introduction, and should be relabeled as such. The "Acknowledgments" and "Overview" pages have the same page number. Chapter titles are not in title case, but in sentence case. The side notes, used to indicate unstable releases, are rather annoying, because each one of them is positioned so that it looks like a continuation of the narrative line to the left of it. All of these side notes — and perhaps the information in the footnotes as well — should be merged into the narrative. As of this writing, the book's site claims that the book has more than 100 screenshots, but by my count there are 87 of the them. All of these blemishes — none serious — suggest that no technical editing was done prior to publication.

However, the main problem with the book is how, at several points in the narrative, the author assumes too much understanding on the part of the reader, and does not provide enough details for the reader who is trying to implement each suggestion on his own computer and yet has never before worked with the modules in question, or even the key concepts. This problem is seen in entire sections (such as the tagging section mentioned above) and lone sentences (such as the baffling "If you want to change a preset later on, just flush the preset after making the changes..." on page 46).

But none of these weaknesses diminish the overall value of this contribution to the Drupal literature. The book largely achieves its goal of teaching the reader how to create his own Drupal-based community site, using core and contributed modules only, with no custom programming (with the exception of some code snippets stored in the Drupal database). The explanations are, for the most part, clear enough for the reader to step through the process within his own Drupal installation. Some people may fault the book as being too lightweight and lacking the in-depth discussions typical of most Drupal books. But those detractors would be missing the point: This particular title is written for a different target audience, namely, people who wish to build a new website as quickly and easily as possible, and who may not have the knowledge or time to write custom code.

With plenty of detailed instructions, and an upbeat tone throughout the presentation, Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide can serve as a useful and fast-paced beginning resource for any Drupal developer who wants to create a social media website, requiring minimal time and custom PHP code.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Among the more popular and better-regarded content management systems (CMSs), Drupal is distinguished partly by its building-block approach, in which a website's functionality is built up in pieces, each of which is a module (either core or contributed). The opposite approach — using far fewer but more encompassing modules — is generally preferred by non-developers who do not relish integrating a sizable collection of modules or trying to modify the underlying code. Nonetheless, anyone who wishes to build a Drupal-based social website, can learn how to do so in a new e-book titled Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide author Dorien Herremans pages 140 publisher Holistic Vibes rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-2839904902 summary How to create a Drupal community site using contrib modules. Published by Holistic Vibes Sàrl in 2009, the book was written by Dorien Herremans, an independent Web developer in Belgium who holds an MSc degree in MIS from the University of Antwerp, and has lectured in IT and 3D computer animation at Les Roches University of Applied Sciences, in Bluche, Switzerland. Her Drupal story is no doubt similar to that of many other Web developers: After building numerous sites in Drupal, she decided to create a new community site — in this case, Raw Vegan Dating. She was well aware that other CMSs offered fairly sophisticated modules that could be dropped into a fresh CMS installation, thereby creating a new community site instantly. But that approach generally requires one to accept the functional limitations of the chosen module, or start hacking the module's code (which for most modules is poorly written and equally poorly documented), with no guarantee that one's modifications will even work. Dorien instead opted for Drupal's flexibility, but found the development process rather difficult and time-consuming, partly because of some technical issues that arose: How can one easily create advanced profiles in Drupal? Can one add a photo gallery to each profile? Ultimately, these lead to a much broader question: Is it possible to build a feature-rich community/dating site using only core and contributed modules, without having to make any modifications to them?

Dorien set out to answer that question, in developing a new site, Drupal Fun, which is a community primarily for Drupal users who have read the book and wish to help each other. The site also offers a few tutorials on how to convert to the latest versions of modules. In making that site, Dorien utilized only available modules, with no changes, and documented each step in the process. The lessons learned from that effort form the foundation of Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide. The first three chapters constitute an introductory foundation; the next two cover user profiles; and the remaining four major chapters explain content, monetization, etc. For all topics, the Drupal Fun site is used as a case study. Even though the book focuses on Drupal version 6, and the example site is created using that version, the book does have notes on how to implement everything in version 5 as well.

In the book's introduction, the author provides a brief overview of Drupal, virtual communities, and her perspective on how to build one of the latter using the former. She states that it is easy to resort to custom modules — i.e., modules created or modified by oneself — but this contradicts one of the central tenets of the book, that a non-programmer would find it difficult if not impossible to go beyond already-available modules in building a community site (unless of course he were to outsource the development of the custom modules). In a footnote, it is incorrectly stated that "You can use the Drupal interface to write a module yourself" (page 4).

The second chapter, titled "Setting up the site," explains the desired functionality of the example site to be created (including the site's main goal, which redundantly was also presented at the end of the previous chapter). The author explains how to install Drupal on one's local Web server. A Windows-only developer may be confused by steps 2, 3, and 8, which are specific to Linux/Unix, but not labeled as such. The expression "hidden files" (page 10) would mean in Windows any files with their "hidden" attributes enabled. But in this case the author is probably referring to a single file, ".htaccess," in the Drupal root directory, because in *nix parlance a file is considered hidden if its name consists only of an extension (such a file is not shown in directory listings by default). The chapter concludes with several figures, which should have been interspersed throughout the earlier narrative.

Any reader following the book should at that point have a working copy of Drupal in his development environment. Chapter 3 explains some basic configuration settings for the newly-installed Drupal instance, as well as how to install modules and themes. However, some of the information is presented in a potentially confusing manner, such as on page 16 when an absolute directory path in one step, is immediately followed by what appears to be another absolute directory path in the next step ("/admin/build/modules"), but is actually meant to convey a navigation path within the Drupal user interface. For a book intended for Drupal newbies, it is essential to clarify technical issues such as this one, because otherwise readers can quickly become frustrated, wondering what the author is discussing and how to follow along in their own Drupal instances. Later, a favicon is described as residing "on the top of your browser window," but that would be the browser icon; rather, favicons are next to the browser's location field and in any relevant tabs. The author briefly describes more than half a dozen modules that arguably should be included in any Drupal site, including ones for dynamic menus, spam control, and task scheduling. Links to the modules' pages — in the text and/or as links in the PDF e-book — would have been quite helpful. The Tagadelic module is recommended for generating tag clouds, including a friendlier 404 error page, using the directory path "/tagadelic"; but Figure 3.5 shows the setting without that leading slash, and a quick test suggests that it does not work. More importantly for the newbie reader, there is no explanation as to how to start using tags. This chapter — like all that follow, except for the last — concludes with a list of contributed modules discussed in the respective chapter. Given that the chapters are short, and the modules' names easily stand out, these module lists add no value and could be removed in a future edition.

In Chapter 4, the reader learns how to use the Content Profile module for making highly functional and versatile user profiles that include photo and video galleries, avatars, contact forms, social networking, map locations, personal Web pages, AdSense revenue streams, and more. Most of the instructions are straightforward, but the discussion on how to implement avatars, on page 30, should have been fleshed out (no pun intended) — with more details as to exactly what settings to make, and where. Chapter 5 extends the previous topic, by demonstrating how to enhance the new user profile content type by implementing additional functionality: image and video galleries, a site member's location on a world map, member search, and featured members. In the next chapter, the author shows how to add more text-oriented content types, using the Views, Panels, and Fivestar modules.

While the first six chapters of the book focus on how to create functionality for users, the three chapters that follow examine how to create functionality for the online community itself. Chapter 7 discusses the details of adding forums, shout boxes, buddy lists, messages, subscriptions, a newsletter, user points, user status, user activity (think Twitter), and user groups. Chapter 8 explains how to utilize Google AdSense, affiliate programs, and donations — so that site owners and members can receive some sort of financial reward for their community-building efforts. Chapter 9 covers subjects that a site builder will encounter near the final stages of site development, such as finalizing the navigation menus, providing a post-registration page, supporting internationalization and localization, customizing system e-mail messages, tuning site performance, promoting a new site, tracking a site's popularity with analytics, performing module updates safely, backing up Drupal files and database, and duplicating a site.

Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide is wrapped up with a brief chapter, an author bio, and an unnecessary marketing description of the book. Unlike most programming books, this one is missing an index — although, as an e-book, it can be searched far easier than a print book.

The list price of the book is a very reasonable €7.70, and it is currently available for €5.50. Even though it is registered under the ISBN 978-2839904902, it is currently not available from Amazon.com, because it is an e-book, and the Amazon.com Kindle is not yet available in Europe; this apparently prohibits European publishers from using it. However, the book's website makes it possible to purchase it online. That site also has more details on the book's contents and the author. In addition to the book site, the first three chapters can be previewed online, via its Google Books listing.

Like any technical work, this one has its strengths and weaknesses. Sadly, the book is marred by generally sloppy writing, with a high ratio of errors to pages. There are several errata: "to[o] much" (pages 4 and 79), "others[']" (page 5), "look[s]" (page 16), "fig 3.3" (page 17; should read "Figure 3.1"), "Imagecache_actions Module" (page 52), "eld avatar" (page 66), "other then" (page 69), "others['] contact link" (page 94), "less then" (page 117), "Clustermaps" (page 124), and ."[my]sql file" (page 128). Also, there are many instances of awkward or incorrect phrasing, such as "harmonic" (page 2; should read "in harmony"), "Skippy balls" (page 3; hint: they have nothing to do with peanut butter), "expansive" (page 4; should read "extensible"), "6-versions" (page 9), "and a while" (page 20; should read "in awhile"), "brackets" (page 26; should read "parentheses"), "200% satisfied" (page 34), "Fixfertig" (page 76), "a grip out" (page 83), and "yourbranch" (page 112). Some of these may be European expressions, though Google suggests otherwise. There are missing commas and hyphens, some punctuation marks used incorrectly, and numerous sentences split at the coordinating conjunction into separate (incomplete) sentences. The use of case and spaces in proper names throughout the book are oftentimes incorrect, e.g., "MySql" (page 10 and others), "ftp" (page 10), "cleanURLs" (page 15), "phptemplate" (page 16), "Dhtml" (page 23), "tagadelic" (page 31), "html" (page 98), and "Paypal" (page 113, etc.). Most of the PHP snippets do not have any proper code indentation. Web accessibility proponents will cringe at the table-based positioning. The book's first "chapter" is really an introduction, and should be relabeled as such. The "Acknowledgments" and "Overview" pages have the same page number. Chapter titles are not in title case, but in sentence case. The side notes, used to indicate unstable releases, are rather annoying, because each one of them is positioned so that it looks like a continuation of the narrative line to the left of it. All of these side notes — and perhaps the information in the footnotes as well — should be merged into the narrative. As of this writing, the book's site claims that the book has more than 100 screenshots, but by my count there are 87 of the them. All of these blemishes — none serious — suggest that no technical editing was done prior to publication.

However, the main problem with the book is how, at several points in the narrative, the author assumes too much understanding on the part of the reader, and does not provide enough details for the reader who is trying to implement each suggestion on his own computer and yet has never before worked with the modules in question, or even the key concepts. This problem is seen in entire sections (such as the tagging section mentioned above) and lone sentences (such as the baffling "If you want to change a preset later on, just flush the preset after making the changes..." on page 46).

But none of these weaknesses diminish the overall value of this contribution to the Drupal literature. The book largely achieves its goal of teaching the reader how to create his own Drupal-based community site, using core and contributed modules only, with no custom programming (with the exception of some code snippets stored in the Drupal database). The explanations are, for the most part, clear enough for the reader to step through the process within his own Drupal installation. Some people may fault the book as being too lightweight and lacking the in-depth discussions typical of most Drupal books. But those detractors would be missing the point: This particular title is written for a different target audience, namely, people who wish to build a new website as quickly and easily as possible, and who may not have the knowledge or time to write custom code.

With plenty of detailed instructions, and an upbeat tone throughout the presentation, Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide can serve as a useful and fast-paced beginning resource for any Drupal developer who wants to create a social media website, requiring minimal time and custom PHP code.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Content management systems (CMSs) are created largely by Web developers using back-end programming languages (such as PHP, by far the most common choice). The free CMSs are built as open source projects, by volunteers who have many demands on their time. As a result of both of these competing factors, far less time is devoted to the front-end aspects of these CMSs. In turn, the "themes" that define the appearance of a CMS-based website are typically substandard, in the eyes of many Web designers and, most likely, countless users of those sites. This criticism has been leveled even against Drupal, although the situation is improving. A new book, Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, is intended to help Drupal designers everywhere speed up that process of improvement." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting author Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Kafer pages 456 publisher Prentice Hall rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0137136698 summary A comprehensive guide to creating Drupal themes. The book was written by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer, and published by Prentice Hall on 15 April 2009, under the ISBN 978-0137136698. As suggested by its title, Front End Drupal "is designed to help both experienced designers and rank novices get an understanding of how Drupal theming works," to quote from the book's foreword, written by Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder and project lead. He notes that creating a Drupal theme requires knowledge of "XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, all within the context of Drupal." These are some of the key technologies addressed in the book's eleven chapters, and it assumes that the reader is at least familiar with all four of them. The first of the two appendices explains: how to install Drupal and contributed modules on the three different platforms supported (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X); basic configuration and administration; and installation troubleshooting tips. The second appendix comprises some of the more important example code used in the book, and brief overviews thereof. At the end of the book's 456 pages, there is a coupon code for a 45-day free subscription to read the online edition in the Safari Books Online library

All of the sample source code and themes can be downloaded from the authors' book website. The site also has the author biographies, as well as reported errata, of which there are two, as of this writing. What is most striking about the site is its styling — or lack thereof. One would think that the authors of a book on Drupal theming would have put a commensurate amount of effort into crafting an attractive custom theme for their own website — one that demonstrates their own theming skills and, more importantly to the reader, what is possible using the principles taught in the book. Remarkably, the authors appear to have done nothing more than take the Drupal 6 default theme, Garland, and change the color scheme from shades of blue to shades of brown (matching the book cover); only the blue Drupal icon is unchanged, and its color clashes with the rest of the site.

Prentice Hall makes available their own Web page for the book, where visitors will find a description, two Amazon.com reviews, the table of contents, and a sample chapter ("The Drupal Page") as a PDF file. The entire book is also available in electronic form.

In the book's preface, the authors briefly summarize the chapters and appendices, and define the target audience and technologies with which the reader should be knowledgeable (noted above). Readers should also be familiar with how Drupal works, have some experience administering a Drupal site, and ideally possess some knowledge of website design and development; but that last one is not a hard requirement, since the authors promise to explain the basic concepts as needed.

Any reader who begins the book by skimming the table of contents or the preface's summary of Chapter 1, may be tempted to skip that chapter, especially since it discusses team workflow — something freelancers generally ignore, and employees leave to management. Yet the earlier material is worth reading, if only that it begins to establish a baseline of terminology used throughout the rest of the book. It also provides some basic information on content structure, layout, and naming on a Drupal page. For illustrating the ideas under discussion, the authors use a number of existing websites. In fact, too many different sites: Readers probably would have found it more useful for each idea to be presented in the context of a single neutral subject area, and without distractions such as toilet birthdays (no kidding). Even better, the ideas could have been illustrated through example pages — each page illustrating one or several ideas — built from the ground up. By focusing on pages that a reader could quickly create on his own, the authors could have eliminated the screenshots of those various websites. One example is Figure 1.1, which combines two images, with the topmost one largely obscuring the one below. Most of the topics are covered at a very high level — possibly higher in some cases than readers will find valuable. Nonetheless, there is much solid advice, including some recommended theme resources later in the chapter. In the earlier section on "Topical Organization," there is a brief but excellent discussion on the relative merits of limited versus unlimited tag vocabularies.

The second chapter continues to lay the groundwork, by introducing basic Drupal theme strategies and terminology, three major modules that veteran Drupal developers use frequently (CCK, Views, and Devel), and some valuable browser-based development tools. The definitions of Drupal terms are useful — especially for newbies confused by the Drupal handbooks. One exception is the authors' alternative metaphor for "weight," which proves more confusing than the original. Readers then begin learning how to use the aforesaid modules and tools. However, several of the authors' statements are misleading: On page 43, they are instructed to install the CCK module, and then given a list of additional modules needed; the first one on the list is... CCK. On the next page, the authors state that the FileField module requires the Token module, but it apparently does not. On the page after that, the "manage fields" link is given as the "add field" link. Those last two discrepancies suggest that the book is based on outdated versions of Drupal and/or the contributed modules under discussion, even though its publication date is just a few weeks prior to this writing. Any version differences are likely impossible to confirm, since the authors fail to mention which versions they are using, or provide any guidance to the reader as to which versions to use — unusual for a programming book. At the beginning of the chapter, the reader is told he "will learn step-by-step how to create a mini portfolio Web site," but the process peters out not long after a new content type is created, and the reader finishes the chapter with no such portfolio site.

Chapters 3 and 4 move the reader one step closer toward the ultimate goal of being able to create a new theme with confidence. The first one explains how to find, install, and configure prebuilt themes — also, how to create a very basic theme from scratch, and a subtheme using the Zen starter theme. This material comprises a generally thorough introduction to the topics, compared to most documentation, with plenty of step-by-step explanation. An exception is the Zen section, in which the reader is instructed to place the directory into the themes folder; but it is not made clear whether this is the primary Drupal themes folder, or sites/all/themes (as advised several pages earlier). Secondly, in step 3, readers can only guess as to what is meant by "the main CSS file," as there are several. On the next page, the authors mention "configure" links next to the Zen and Zen Classic themes, but no such links exist for those starter themes. The fourth chapter discusses page template files, site-wide variables, menus and navigation, regions and blocks, search results, templating different sections of a site, aliased URLs, taxonomy templates, and styling for output to printers, PDF files, and mobile devices.

The fifth chapter explores the details of how to modify existing node templates, or create new ones, for all content types. This is what makes it possible to develop highly customized page content, including summaries, embedded images, image galleries, and content based upon output from the Views module. The subsequent chapter focuses on one of the most problematic types of content — forms — and how they can be created using the CCK. The authors recommend TinyMCE as one's WYSIWYG editor module, but that has apparently been replaced by the Wysiwyg API. User editing of content is a key element in building an online community using a Drupal-based site, and it is the topic of Chapter 7, which discusses user profiles, permissions, access, comments, blogs, forums, wikis, spam, CAPTCHAs, and how to make content private for members only. The next chapter addresses the theming of the administrative interface, which the typical site user will never see, but can have a significant impact upon the productivity of the developers and maintainers of a site. Readers learn about RootCandy (a refreshingly different admin theme), and how to theme error pages.

The final three chapters focus on JavaScript and jQuery. Consequently, they compose a stand-alone resource of their own, and could even have been used as the basis for a separate book. Chapter 9 provides an overview of the language, while the other two chapters cover jQuery and how it can be used as part of a Drupal-based site.

Scattered throughout the manuscript are tips, each indicated with a pencil tip icon. These help to break up the text visually, and provide valuable guidance. The contrast between the black text and the dark gray background could certainly be improved; but most of the tips are fairly short, so this does not pose a major problem.

Every chapter ends with a summary, and not a single one of them is useful or needed. Any unique information conveyed in them should have been merged with the introductory paragraphs for the respective chapters, which is where readers would be looking anyway to see what each chapter addresses.

The book has numerous minor problems, including grammatical and stylistic errors, such as dashes incorrectly performing the duty of semicolons, some URLs missing the root directory slash, and excessive use of exclamation marks (more than a dozen before even reaching the second chapter). When stating the sequence of menu items to choose in order to reach a particular admin page, the authors should use ">" or ">>" to separate the menu choices, as is done in most computer books. Instead, the authors opted to use commas, which of course turns every sequential menu path into a list of menu items, which is nonstandard and disconcerting. As is typical in a first edition, the book contains several errata: "Partnership" in Figure 1.7 (page 10), "the GiMP" (page 14; should simply read "GIMP"; after all, this isn't Pulp Fiction), "only focus only" (page 26), "Modification / Date" in Figure 2.1 (page 37; should read "Modification date"), "Content Creation Kit" (throughout the book; should read "Content Construction Kit"), "of [the] view" (page 56), "http:jigsaw" (page 66), "INSTALL [is] present" (page 79), "of [a] page" (page 100), and "to to" (page 125) — in the first quarter of the book alone.

A lingering disappointment is that some of the promised examples are not finished in the narrative, such as the portfolio site mentioned earlier. Secondly, the downloadable source code is incomplete, apparently missing the example code in the first few chapters, such as the Bolg theme files. Furthermore, the downloadable code is not organized by chapter, making it difficult to even determine what example code is missing.

On the other hand, the book has much to offer. For the most part, the explanations and step-by-step instructions are clear, and the diagrams and screenshots are all neatly presented and helpful — though some sections of the book could have benefited from more such figures. With its extensive coverage of all the key technologies, and its wealth of valuable tips, Front End Drupal is an essential resource for learning how to create Drupal themes, and fills a long-standing gap in the Drupal literature, better than any other book currently available.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Content management systems (CMSs) are created largely by Web developers using back-end programming languages (such as PHP, by far the most common choice). The free CMSs are built as open source projects, by volunteers who have many demands on their time. As a result of both of these competing factors, far less time is devoted to the front-end aspects of these CMSs. In turn, the "themes" that define the appearance of a CMS-based website are typically substandard, in the eyes of many Web designers and, most likely, countless users of those sites. This criticism has been leveled even against Drupal, although the situation is improving. A new book, Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, is intended to help Drupal designers everywhere speed up that process of improvement." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting author Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Kafer pages 456 publisher Prentice Hall rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0137136698 summary A comprehensive guide to creating Drupal themes. The book was written by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer, and published by Prentice Hall on 15 April 2009, under the ISBN 978-0137136698. As suggested by its title, Front End Drupal "is designed to help both experienced designers and rank novices get an understanding of how Drupal theming works," to quote from the book's foreword, written by Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder and project lead. He notes that creating a Drupal theme requires knowledge of "XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, all within the context of Drupal." These are some of the key technologies addressed in the book's eleven chapters, and it assumes that the reader is at least familiar with all four of them. The first of the two appendices explains: how to install Drupal and contributed modules on the three different platforms supported (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X); basic configuration and administration; and installation troubleshooting tips. The second appendix comprises some of the more important example code used in the book, and brief overviews thereof. At the end of the book's 456 pages, there is a coupon code for a 45-day free subscription to read the online edition in the Safari Books Online library

All of the sample source code and themes can be downloaded from the authors' book website. The site also has the author biographies, as well as reported errata, of which there are two, as of this writing. What is most striking about the site is its styling — or lack thereof. One would think that the authors of a book on Drupal theming would have put a commensurate amount of effort into crafting an attractive custom theme for their own website — one that demonstrates their own theming skills and, more importantly to the reader, what is possible using the principles taught in the book. Remarkably, the authors appear to have done nothing more than take the Drupal 6 default theme, Garland, and change the color scheme from shades of blue to shades of brown (matching the book cover); only the blue Drupal icon is unchanged, and its color clashes with the rest of the site.

Prentice Hall makes available their own Web page for the book, where visitors will find a description, two Amazon.com reviews, the table of contents, and a sample chapter ("The Drupal Page") as a PDF file. The entire book is also available in electronic form.

In the book's preface, the authors briefly summarize the chapters and appendices, and define the target audience and technologies with which the reader should be knowledgeable (noted above). Readers should also be familiar with how Drupal works, have some experience administering a Drupal site, and ideally possess some knowledge of website design and development; but that last one is not a hard requirement, since the authors promise to explain the basic concepts as needed.

Any reader who begins the book by skimming the table of contents or the preface's summary of Chapter 1, may be tempted to skip that chapter, especially since it discusses team workflow — something freelancers generally ignore, and employees leave to management. Yet the earlier material is worth reading, if only that it begins to establish a baseline of terminology used throughout the rest of the book. It also provides some basic information on content structure, layout, and naming on a Drupal page. For illustrating the ideas under discussion, the authors use a number of existing websites. In fact, too many different sites: Readers probably would have found it more useful for each idea to be presented in the context of a single neutral subject area, and without distractions such as toilet birthdays (no kidding). Even better, the ideas could have been illustrated through example pages — each page illustrating one or several ideas — built from the ground up. By focusing on pages that a reader could quickly create on his own, the authors could have eliminated the screenshots of those various websites. One example is Figure 1.1, which combines two images, with the topmost one largely obscuring the one below. Most of the topics are covered at a very high level — possibly higher in some cases than readers will find valuable. Nonetheless, there is much solid advice, including some recommended theme resources later in the chapter. In the earlier section on "Topical Organization," there is a brief but excellent discussion on the relative merits of limited versus unlimited tag vocabularies.

The second chapter continues to lay the groundwork, by introducing basic Drupal theme strategies and terminology, three major modules that veteran Drupal developers use frequently (CCK, Views, and Devel), and some valuable browser-based development tools. The definitions of Drupal terms are useful — especially for newbies confused by the Drupal handbooks. One exception is the authors' alternative metaphor for "weight," which proves more confusing than the original. Readers then begin learning how to use the aforesaid modules and tools. However, several of the authors' statements are misleading: On page 43, they are instructed to install the CCK module, and then given a list of additional modules needed; the first one on the list is... CCK. On the next page, the authors state that the FileField module requires the Token module, but it apparently does not. On the page after that, the "manage fields" link is given as the "add field" link. Those last two discrepancies suggest that the book is based on outdated versions of Drupal and/or the contributed modules under discussion, even though its publication date is just a few weeks prior to this writing. Any version differences are likely impossible to confirm, since the authors fail to mention which versions they are using, or provide any guidance to the reader as to which versions to use — unusual for a programming book. At the beginning of the chapter, the reader is told he "will learn step-by-step how to create a mini portfolio Web site," but the process peters out not long after a new content type is created, and the reader finishes the chapter with no such portfolio site.

Chapters 3 and 4 move the reader one step closer toward the ultimate goal of being able to create a new theme with confidence. The first one explains how to find, install, and configure prebuilt themes — also, how to create a very basic theme from scratch, and a subtheme using the Zen starter theme. This material comprises a generally thorough introduction to the topics, compared to most documentation, with plenty of step-by-step explanation. An exception is the Zen section, in which the reader is instructed to place the directory into the themes folder; but it is not made clear whether this is the primary Drupal themes folder, or sites/all/themes (as advised several pages earlier). Secondly, in step 3, readers can only guess as to what is meant by "the main CSS file," as there are several. On the next page, the authors mention "configure" links next to the Zen and Zen Classic themes, but no such links exist for those starter themes. The fourth chapter discusses page template files, site-wide variables, menus and navigation, regions and blocks, search results, templating different sections of a site, aliased URLs, taxonomy templates, and styling for output to printers, PDF files, and mobile devices.

The fifth chapter explores the details of how to modify existing node templates, or create new ones, for all content types. This is what makes it possible to develop highly customized page content, including summaries, embedded images, image galleries, and content based upon output from the Views module. The subsequent chapter focuses on one of the most problematic types of content — forms — and how they can be created using the CCK. The authors recommend TinyMCE as one's WYSIWYG editor module, but that has apparently been replaced by the Wysiwyg API. User editing of content is a key element in building an online community using a Drupal-based site, and it is the topic of Chapter 7, which discusses user profiles, permissions, access, comments, blogs, forums, wikis, spam, CAPTCHAs, and how to make content private for members only. The next chapter addresses the theming of the administrative interface, which the typical site user will never see, but can have a significant impact upon the productivity of the developers and maintainers of a site. Readers learn about RootCandy (a refreshingly different admin theme), and how to theme error pages.

The final three chapters focus on JavaScript and jQuery. Consequently, they compose a stand-alone resource of their own, and could even have been used as the basis for a separate book. Chapter 9 provides an overview of the language, while the other two chapters cover jQuery and how it can be used as part of a Drupal-based site.

Scattered throughout the manuscript are tips, each indicated with a pencil tip icon. These help to break up the text visually, and provide valuable guidance. The contrast between the black text and the dark gray background could certainly be improved; but most of the tips are fairly short, so this does not pose a major problem.

Every chapter ends with a summary, and not a single one of them is useful or needed. Any unique information conveyed in them should have been merged with the introductory paragraphs for the respective chapters, which is where readers would be looking anyway to see what each chapter addresses.

The book has numerous minor problems, including grammatical and stylistic errors, such as dashes incorrectly performing the duty of semicolons, some URLs missing the root directory slash, and excessive use of exclamation marks (more than a dozen before even reaching the second chapter). When stating the sequence of menu items to choose in order to reach a particular admin page, the authors should use ">" or ">>" to separate the menu choices, as is done in most computer books. Instead, the authors opted to use commas, which of course turns every sequential menu path into a list of menu items, which is nonstandard and disconcerting. As is typical in a first edition, the book contains several errata: "Partnership" in Figure 1.7 (page 10), "the GiMP" (page 14; should simply read "GIMP"; after all, this isn't Pulp Fiction), "only focus only" (page 26), "Modification / Date" in Figure 2.1 (page 37; should read "Modification date"), "Content Creation Kit" (throughout the book; should read "Content Construction Kit"), "of [the] view" (page 56), "http:jigsaw" (page 66), "INSTALL [is] present" (page 79), "of [a] page" (page 100), and "to to" (page 125) — in the first quarter of the book alone.

A lingering disappointment is that some of the promised examples are not finished in the narrative, such as the portfolio site mentioned earlier. Secondly, the downloadable source code is incomplete, apparently missing the example code in the first few chapters, such as the Bolg theme files. Furthermore, the downloadable code is not organized by chapter, making it difficult to even determine what example code is missing.

On the other hand, the book has much to offer. For the most part, the explanations and step-by-step instructions are clear, and the diagrams and screenshots are all neatly presented and helpful — though some sections of the book could have benefited from more such figures. With its extensive coverage of all the key technologies, and its wealth of valuable tips, Front End Drupal is an essential resource for learning how to create Drupal themes, and fills a long-standing gap in the Drupal literature, better than any other book currently available.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Two decades ago, Web usage was limited to a single individual (Sir Tim Berners-Lee) using the only browser in existence (WorldWideWeb) running on a single platform (a NeXT Computer). Nowadays, billions of people access the Web daily, with the ability to choose from over a dozen browsers running on desktop computers, laptops, and a variety of mobile devices, such as cell phones. The number of possible combinations is growing rapidly, and makes it increasingly difficult for Web designers and developers to craft their sites so as to be universally accessible. This is particularly true when accounting for Web users with physical and cognitive disabilities — especially if they do not have access to assistive technologies. The challenges and solutions for anyone creating an accessible website are addressed in Universal Design for Web Applications, authored by Wendy Chisholm and Matt May." Keep reading for the rest of Michael and Laura's review. Universal Design for Web Applications author Wendy Chisholm and Matt May pages 198 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 5/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross with Laura Andres ISBN 9780596518738 summary An introduction to accessible Web design. The book was published by O'Reilly Media on 26 November 2008, under the ISBN 9780596518738, and weighs in at a slender 198 pages. The publisher offers a Web page for the book, where visitors will find a detailed description, a customer review, errata (there are none listed, as of this writing), a sample chapter (the 11th one, "The Process") in PDF format, and other items that may be of interest to the prospective reader. The authors as well have a website for the book, which offers the 20 accessibility checklist questions from Chapter 11, as well as slides from the authors' presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo on 17 September 2008 in New York City.

In the preface to their book, the authors explain that the purpose of universal Web design is to make Web content "work as efficiently as possible across the range of capabilities exhibited by both people and their chosen browsing technologies." While it has little to do with efficiency per se, maximum Web usability is a laudable goal for every designer and developer of a website or Web-based application. The consensus in the Web design community is that the most effective way to achieve this goal is through adherence to accepted usability standards and design practices, and those are the topics that the authors explore in the eleven chapters that compose this book: an introduction; selling universal design; metadata; structure and design; forms; tabular data; video and audio; scripting; AJAX and WAI-ARIA; Rich Internet applications; and the universal design process.

The first chapter serves as a brief introduction to the concept and overall purpose of universal design (UD), which the authors consider to be "the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design" (as defined by architect Ron Mace). In view of the brevity and preliminary nature of this chapter's material, it should have been labeled as an introduction, and not a chapter. More importantly, the discussion is rather choppy, jumping among topics such as architecture, grocery stores, unemployment rates among the blind, and mobile phones. Readers will likely be confused by the authors' statement that "mobile and accessible design are also at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to meeting our stated goal," as that suggests that the more mobile the device, the least accessible platform it can ever be. Yet the gist of the discussion is clear: The need for maximally accessible websites is quite important — critical to those with various disabilities — and will become more so with the proliferation of Web-enabled mobile devices.

If any chapter in this book is going to raise hackles, it is surely the second one. It focuses on how to sell Web accessibility to decision-makers, such as convincing management that compliance with universal design standards — in creating a new site or re-creating an existing one — is worth the investment. This position could easily be supported with a thoroughly positive mindset, such as showing how enhanced accessibility for some is beneficial to all. Instead, the authors initially take a more negative approach, and begin the chapter with somewhat hostile descriptions of what it is like to not understand a movie, and the resistance the authors have encountered in selling accessibility to clients. The authors clearly want the reader to empathize with such people, but the methods employed are questionable — such as asserting that all of us can face a handicap at some point, and thus we can all be lumped together as "disabled." While the authors' passion for online resources being made available to everyone, is certainly laudable, there is nothing to be gained from making sweeping generalizations or lecturing the reader. (Overstating one's arguments tends to turn off listeners, and provides fodder for counterarguments.) The authors go on to define the four major categories of physical and situational disabilities, as they relate to website usage. They cite statistics for deafness and hard of hearing, but neglect to include tinnitus, which apparently has more sufferers than those first two conditions combined. Next, the authors provide selling points for employing universal design to increase a site's potential audience — humans and search engines — thereby increasing financial results and adhering to legal restrictions. Readers are referred to a number of pertinent resources, including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG), the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG), the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite (WAI-ARIA), and the Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP). Nearing the end of the chapter, the authors return to the minefield of how to convince the "prejudiced developer" and manager that they should learn and utilize accessibility best practices in creating websites for which they are responsible, especially when they see no value or need for it. Lastly, excellent arguments for the product benefits of continuous accessible design are briefly presented.

By the third chapter, Web designers and developers who purchased this book to learn specific accessibility techniques, may become a bit impatient, since nothing concrete has been presented up to that point (despite the claim later in the chapter that "We've devoted three chapters to making web applications accessible."). Fortunately, this chapter gets things going by addressing metadata and how it can be leveraged to increase content accessibility. The specific techniques discussed include the alt, height, and width attributes for image tags; document-level metadata, including title tags; and link text. The guidelines are definitely worthwhile, but the presentation could have been better edited. For example, the authors state that the alt text for a linked image is "a verb and represents where the link will take you" (page 27), but a destination is not a verb, and neither is the example provided ("next page").

Chapter 4 addresses the structuring and design of Web pages, and covers important topics of semantic markup, headings, links, lists, forms, tables, colors, layout choices, text sizing, fonts, and images. For some reason not explained to the reader, forms are discussed first, even before semantics, which is odd. Nonetheless, all of the suggestions provided are well worth learning and incorporating into one's own repertoire of Web coding and design principles. The authors rightly teach the maxim "separate structure and presentation," and demonstrate how to do this throughout the discussion of the aforesaid topics. Also addressed are flickering images — and one of the dangers thereof, photoepilepsy — and HTML e-mail messages.

Web forms possibly compose the most problematic type of page element, especially in terms of usability and accessibility, because they involve for more user input than any other. This is especially true with forms that use CAPTCHAs in an attempt to defeat form spam. Chapter 5 encompasses a useful discussion, with illustrative sample code, covering the key considerations for coding accessible forms — including labels, fieldsets and their legends, accesskey attributes, and tab order among elements. The authors state that a block of sample form code (page 54) is available on their website, but, as of this writing, it could not be found. Yet readers may not want to use that code anyway, since all of the labels and all of the input fields are separated, into two divs; no explanation is given as to why this nonstandard structure was chosen. Error handling is a subject that stymies countless inexperienced Web programmers, as evidenced by the oftentimes useless messages displayed on the sites that they have created, and the authors provide solid advice, with emphasis on client-side error handling. The chapter concludes with a somewhat short discussion of what they consider "Public Enemy #1 for blind, low-vision, and dyslexic people," the dreaded CAPTCHA, with links to two publications that propose alternatives.

Accessibility abuses are especially prevalent with three types of Web content: HTML tables and multimedia. These are the topics of chapters 6 and 7, respectively. Semantic use of HTML tables for tabular data is seeing a resurgence with the growing interest in accessible design, and Chapter 6 explains how to implement them properly. However, Figure 6-3 purportedly contains blue shading, but it is effectively invisible on the black-and-white printed page. Chapter 7 explains how to add captions and audio descriptions to audiovisual files, or outsource the work. But first the reader slogs through a detailed history of Web-based video that is unneeded, despite the authors' claims that knowledge of the history is important.

The next two chapters discuss the use of JavaScript and AJAX as they pertain to site accessibility, and could be combined into a single chapter. The first one briefly addresses a number of related topics: progressive enhancement, Unobtrusive JavaScript (again with an unnecessary history), keyboard activation of pop-up menus, limitations of :hover pseudoselectors, two recommended drop-down menu scripts, and tabbing order. One of the scripts is an open-source script that the authors claim can be downloaded from their website; but, like the form sample code mentioned above, the promised script is missing from their site. The authors later declare (page 107) that in this chapter they show "you how to add JavaScript to your HTML and CSS to make a web application," when in fact they do nothing of the sort. Entire books explain how to make Web applications — not something accomplished in a 15-page chapter. Chapter 9 focuses on AJAX and WAI-ARIA — specifically, the ways that the AJAX paradigm clashes with the current state of assistive technologies, and how ARIA may prove the best solution — resolving the keyboard activation problem covered in the previous chapter, and handling tab ordering in a more elegant manner — though still not ubiquitously implemented. The narrative's flow is interrupted with almost three pages of JavaScript that the reader is apparently not expected to implement as-is or even use as sample code to learn from, and thus looks suspiciously like padding.

In Chapter 10, the authors discuss the unfortunate lack of Web accessibility guidelines for Rich Internet applications (RIAs) developed using technologies such as Java, Flex, and Silverlight. To remedy this, the authors promise "a crash course in software accessibility as applied to Flex and Silverlight," but only deliver on the second half of that promise. For illustrating Silverlight development, they provide some of the code for creating a custom Digg button (although the term "buttons" is also confusingly used). The chapter concludes with mention of some tools from Microsoft for testing RIAs that utilize Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA).

The last chapter begins with a brief high-level perspective on the importance of baking accessibility into any new application or site from the start, and then explores numerous development and testing tools and other resources. Perhaps the material that will be most referenced in the future by readers, are the 20 key questions that a designer can use as a valuable checklist for evaluating a site she has created. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on strategies for successful universal design, for four different team sizes. The book's sole appendix consists of a table relisting the 20 key usability questions, and for each one, the specifications of the WCAG 2.0 Proposed Recommendation, the MWBP 1.0, and the UD4WA. This is followed by an index that proved quite disappointing, as it contains almost none of the entries that I attempted to look up.

Universal Design for Web Applications has numerous relatively minor flaws that could be fixed in a future edition: Some of the chapter summaries comprise only one or two sentences, and add no value to the book, since the chapters themselves are so short. Other chapter summaries contain new material not even mentioned in the respective chapters, and should be renamed as final sections. Many of the URLs are wisely presented as footnotes — instead of embedded in the text, as is done in many other technical books, which impedes reading flow. Unfortunately, this practice was not followed consistently throughout the book. In some passages, the writing style is rather unpolished; for instance, "mobile and accessibility as our criteria" (page 2), mixes adjective and noun. In other passages, the statements are hyperbolic; for instance, a reporter "found himself a hair's breadth from being eviscerated" (page 4). Some unexplained phrases will prove cryptic to many readers; for instance, "content adaptation" (page 24), "lolcats" (page 26), and "antipattern" (page 37). The use of a shortened URL (page 23) is inadvisable, since it depends upon the longevity of the particular service provider and the short URL that the service generated. Some of the terminology is inconsistent, e.g., the Enter key referred to as a "Return" key. The book contains a couple erratum: "to to" (page 12), and a sentence missing a verb (page 111, beginning with "Layering").

A visually annoying problem with this book is the manner in which, on far too many lines in the text, there is an inadequate amount of space between the words. Consequently, distinguishing individual words — particularly when trying to read at a fast pace — is made much more difficult. While skimming, each line begins to look like one extremely long word. There is no excuse for this, since there is plenty of space in the outer margins to have expanded the lines, and the number of pages is far less than in a typical computer book. This is not the first of the most recently published O'Reilly books to exhibit this problem, but I certainly hope it is the last. It is rather ironic to see this readability mistake in a book devoted to usability and accessibility. (Note that production decisions such as whitespace are not decided by the authors.)

Perhaps the most exasperating defect of all is that both instances of code that supposedly can be downloaded from the authors' website, are nowhere to be found, as of this writing — nor is the code available on the O'Reilly page for the book. In fact, a reader comment on that O'Reilly page indicates that the script code wasn't available on 30 December 2008, just weeks after the book's publication. This is quite unlike the level of follow-through typically seen with O'Reilly authors.

In some respects, the book could have been far better than the final product. It gets off to a weak start with a non-chapter, and then in several sections spends pages discussing the history of various technologies, but then fails to go into enough detail so the reader could use the current state of those technologies to implement what is promised in the book. It also could have been improved with much more detailed and usable discussions of such topics as scrolling, bypassing blocks of content, session time limits on forms, site maps, breadcrumb trails, usable CAPTCHA alternatives, typography, text case, paragraph justification, sign language, text direction, and techniques for providing text for image-heavy websites — as well as more complete code examples.

Nonetheless, Universal Design for Web Applications provides some valuable recommendations and pointers on how website designers, developers, and owners can greatly increase the accessibility of their sites to the growing variety of human and search engine visitors on the Internet.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer. Laura Andres is a Unix administrator, Oracle DBA, and programmer.

You can purchase Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Two decades ago, Web usage was limited to a single individual (Sir Tim Berners-Lee) using the only browser in existence (WorldWideWeb) running on a single platform (a NeXT Computer). Nowadays, billions of people access the Web daily, with the ability to choose from over a dozen browsers running on desktop computers, laptops, and a variety of mobile devices, such as cell phones. The number of possible combinations is growing rapidly, and makes it increasingly difficult for Web designers and developers to craft their sites so as to be universally accessible. This is particularly true when accounting for Web users with physical and cognitive disabilities — especially if they do not have access to assistive technologies. The challenges and solutions for anyone creating an accessible website are addressed in Universal Design for Web Applications, authored by Wendy Chisholm and Matt May." Keep reading for the rest of Michael and Laura's review. Universal Design for Web Applications author Wendy Chisholm and Matt May pages 198 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 5/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross with Laura Andres ISBN 9780596518738 summary An introduction to accessible Web design. The book was published by O'Reilly Media on 26 November 2008, under the ISBN 9780596518738, and weighs in at a slender 198 pages. The publisher offers a Web page for the book, where visitors will find a detailed description, a customer review, errata (there are none listed, as of this writing), a sample chapter (the 11th one, "The Process") in PDF format, and other items that may be of interest to the prospective reader. The authors as well have a website for the book, which offers the 20 accessibility checklist questions from Chapter 11, as well as slides from the authors' presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo on 17 September 2008 in New York City.

In the preface to their book, the authors explain that the purpose of universal Web design is to make Web content "work as efficiently as possible across the range of capabilities exhibited by both people and their chosen browsing technologies." While it has little to do with efficiency per se, maximum Web usability is a laudable goal for every designer and developer of a website or Web-based application. The consensus in the Web design community is that the most effective way to achieve this goal is through adherence to accepted usability standards and design practices, and those are the topics that the authors explore in the eleven chapters that compose this book: an introduction; selling universal design; metadata; structure and design; forms; tabular data; video and audio; scripting; AJAX and WAI-ARIA; Rich Internet applications; and the universal design process.

The first chapter serves as a brief introduction to the concept and overall purpose of universal design (UD), which the authors consider to be "the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design" (as defined by architect Ron Mace). In view of the brevity and preliminary nature of this chapter's material, it should have been labeled as an introduction, and not a chapter. More importantly, the discussion is rather choppy, jumping among topics such as architecture, grocery stores, unemployment rates among the blind, and mobile phones. Readers will likely be confused by the authors' statement that "mobile and accessible design are also at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to meeting our stated goal," as that suggests that the more mobile the device, the least accessible platform it can ever be. Yet the gist of the discussion is clear: The need for maximally accessible websites is quite important — critical to those with various disabilities — and will become more so with the proliferation of Web-enabled mobile devices.

If any chapter in this book is going to raise hackles, it is surely the second one. It focuses on how to sell Web accessibility to decision-makers, such as convincing management that compliance with universal design standards — in creating a new site or re-creating an existing one — is worth the investment. This position could easily be supported with a thoroughly positive mindset, such as showing how enhanced accessibility for some is beneficial to all. Instead, the authors initially take a more negative approach, and begin the chapter with somewhat hostile descriptions of what it is like to not understand a movie, and the resistance the authors have encountered in selling accessibility to clients. The authors clearly want the reader to empathize with such people, but the methods employed are questionable — such as asserting that all of us can face a handicap at some point, and thus we can all be lumped together as "disabled." While the authors' passion for online resources being made available to everyone, is certainly laudable, there is nothing to be gained from making sweeping generalizations or lecturing the reader. (Overstating one's arguments tends to turn off listeners, and provides fodder for counterarguments.) The authors go on to define the four major categories of physical and situational disabilities, as they relate to website usage. They cite statistics for deafness and hard of hearing, but neglect to include tinnitus, which apparently has more sufferers than those first two conditions combined. Next, the authors provide selling points for employing universal design to increase a site's potential audience — humans and search engines — thereby increasing financial results and adhering to legal restrictions. Readers are referred to a number of pertinent resources, including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG), the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG), the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite (WAI-ARIA), and the Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP). Nearing the end of the chapter, the authors return to the minefield of how to convince the "prejudiced developer" and manager that they should learn and utilize accessibility best practices in creating websites for which they are responsible, especially when they see no value or need for it. Lastly, excellent arguments for the product benefits of continuous accessible design are briefly presented.

By the third chapter, Web designers and developers who purchased this book to learn specific accessibility techniques, may become a bit impatient, since nothing concrete has been presented up to that point (despite the claim later in the chapter that "We've devoted three chapters to making web applications accessible."). Fortunately, this chapter gets things going by addressing metadata and how it can be leveraged to increase content accessibility. The specific techniques discussed include the alt, height, and width attributes for image tags; document-level metadata, including title tags; and link text. The guidelines are definitely worthwhile, but the presentation could have been better edited. For example, the authors state that the alt text for a linked image is "a verb and represents where the link will take you" (page 27), but a destination is not a verb, and neither is the example provided ("next page").

Chapter 4 addresses the structuring and design of Web pages, and covers important topics of semantic markup, headings, links, lists, forms, tables, colors, layout choices, text sizing, fonts, and images. For some reason not explained to the reader, forms are discussed first, even before semantics, which is odd. Nonetheless, all of the suggestions provided are well worth learning and incorporating into one's own repertoire of Web coding and design principles. The authors rightly teach the maxim "separate structure and presentation," and demonstrate how to do this throughout the discussion of the aforesaid topics. Also addressed are flickering images — and one of the dangers thereof, photoepilepsy — and HTML e-mail messages.

Web forms possibly compose the most problematic type of page element, especially in terms of usability and accessibility, because they involve for more user input than any other. This is especially true with forms that use CAPTCHAs in an attempt to defeat form spam. Chapter 5 encompasses a useful discussion, with illustrative sample code, covering the key considerations for coding accessible forms — including labels, fieldsets and their legends, accesskey attributes, and tab order among elements. The authors state that a block of sample form code (page 54) is available on their website, but, as of this writing, it could not be found. Yet readers may not want to use that code anyway, since all of the labels and all of the input fields are separated, into two divs; no explanation is given as to why this nonstandard structure was chosen. Error handling is a subject that stymies countless inexperienced Web programmers, as evidenced by the oftentimes useless messages displayed on the sites that they have created, and the authors provide solid advice, with emphasis on client-side error handling. The chapter concludes with a somewhat short discussion of what they consider "Public Enemy #1 for blind, low-vision, and dyslexic people," the dreaded CAPTCHA, with links to two publications that propose alternatives.

Accessibility abuses are especially prevalent with three types of Web content: HTML tables and multimedia. These are the topics of chapters 6 and 7, respectively. Semantic use of HTML tables for tabular data is seeing a resurgence with the growing interest in accessible design, and Chapter 6 explains how to implement them properly. However, Figure 6-3 purportedly contains blue shading, but it is effectively invisible on the black-and-white printed page. Chapter 7 explains how to add captions and audio descriptions to audiovisual files, or outsource the work. But first the reader slogs through a detailed history of Web-based video that is unneeded, despite the authors' claims that knowledge of the history is important.

The next two chapters discuss the use of JavaScript and AJAX as they pertain to site accessibility, and could be combined into a single chapter. The first one briefly addresses a number of related topics: progressive enhancement, Unobtrusive JavaScript (again with an unnecessary history), keyboard activation of pop-up menus, limitations of :hover pseudoselectors, two recommended drop-down menu scripts, and tabbing order. One of the scripts is an open-source script that the authors claim can be downloaded from their website; but, like the form sample code mentioned above, the promised script is missing from their site. The authors later declare (page 107) that in this chapter they show "you how to add JavaScript to your HTML and CSS to make a web application," when in fact they do nothing of the sort. Entire books explain how to make Web applications — not something accomplished in a 15-page chapter. Chapter 9 focuses on AJAX and WAI-ARIA — specifically, the ways that the AJAX paradigm clashes with the current state of assistive technologies, and how ARIA may prove the best solution — resolving the keyboard activation problem covered in the previous chapter, and handling tab ordering in a more elegant manner — though still not ubiquitously implemented. The narrative's flow is interrupted with almost three pages of JavaScript that the reader is apparently not expected to implement as-is or even use as sample code to learn from, and thus looks suspiciously like padding.

In Chapter 10, the authors discuss the unfortunate lack of Web accessibility guidelines for Rich Internet applications (RIAs) developed using technologies such as Java, Flex, and Silverlight. To remedy this, the authors promise "a crash course in software accessibility as applied to Flex and Silverlight," but only deliver on the second half of that promise. For illustrating Silverlight development, they provide some of the code for creating a custom Digg button (although the term "buttons" is also confusingly used). The chapter concludes with mention of some tools from Microsoft for testing RIAs that utilize Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA).

The last chapter begins with a brief high-level perspective on the importance of baking accessibility into any new application or site from the start, and then explores numerous development and testing tools and other resources. Perhaps the material that will be most referenced in the future by readers, are the 20 key questions that a designer can use as a valuable checklist for evaluating a site she has created. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on strategies for successful universal design, for four different team sizes. The book's sole appendix consists of a table relisting the 20 key usability questions, and for each one, the specifications of the WCAG 2.0 Proposed Recommendation, the MWBP 1.0, and the UD4WA. This is followed by an index that proved quite disappointing, as it contains almost none of the entries that I attempted to look up.

Universal Design for Web Applications has numerous relatively minor flaws that could be fixed in a future edition: Some of the chapter summaries comprise only one or two sentences, and add no value to the book, since the chapters themselves are so short. Other chapter summaries contain new material not even mentioned in the respective chapters, and should be renamed as final sections. Many of the URLs are wisely presented as footnotes — instead of embedded in the text, as is done in many other technical books, which impedes reading flow. Unfortunately, this practice was not followed consistently throughout the book. In some passages, the writing style is rather unpolished; for instance, "mobile and accessibility as our criteria" (page 2), mixes adjective and noun. In other passages, the statements are hyperbolic; for instance, a reporter "found himself a hair's breadth from being eviscerated" (page 4). Some unexplained phrases will prove cryptic to many readers; for instance, "content adaptation" (page 24), "lolcats" (page 26), and "antipattern" (page 37). The use of a shortened URL (page 23) is inadvisable, since it depends upon the longevity of the particular service provider and the short URL that the service generated. Some of the terminology is inconsistent, e.g., the Enter key referred to as a "Return" key. The book contains a couple erratum: "to to" (page 12), and a sentence missing a verb (page 111, beginning with "Layering").

A visually annoying problem with this book is the manner in which, on far too many lines in the text, there is an inadequate amount of space between the words. Consequently, distinguishing individual words — particularly when trying to read at a fast pace — is made much more difficult. While skimming, each line begins to look like one extremely long word. There is no excuse for this, since there is plenty of space in the outer margins to have expanded the lines, and the number of pages is far less than in a typical computer book. This is not the first of the most recently published O'Reilly books to exhibit this problem, but I certainly hope it is the last. It is rather ironic to see this readability mistake in a book devoted to usability and accessibility. (Note that production decisions such as whitespace are not decided by the authors.)

Perhaps the most exasperating defect of all is that both instances of code that supposedly can be downloaded from the authors' website, are nowhere to be found, as of this writing — nor is the code available on the O'Reilly page for the book. In fact, a reader comment on that O'Reilly page indicates that the script code wasn't available on 30 December 2008, just weeks after the book's publication. This is quite unlike the level of follow-through typically seen with O'Reilly authors.

In some respects, the book could have been far better than the final product. It gets off to a weak start with a non-chapter, and then in several sections spends pages discussing the history of various technologies, but then fails to go into enough detail so the reader could use the current state of those technologies to implement what is promised in the book. It also could have been improved with much more detailed and usable discussions of such topics as scrolling, bypassing blocks of content, session time limits on forms, site maps, breadcrumb trails, usable CAPTCHA alternatives, typography, text case, paragraph justification, sign language, text direction, and techniques for providing text for image-heavy websites — as well as more complete code examples.

Nonetheless, Universal Design for Web Applications provides some valuable recommendations and pointers on how website designers, developers, and owners can greatly increase the accessibility of their sites to the growing variety of human and search engine visitors on the Internet.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer. Laura Andres is a Unix administrator, Oracle DBA, and programmer.

You can purchase Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "The owners and the developers of typical Web sites face a quandary, one often unrecognized and unstated: They generally want their sites' contents and functionality to be accessible to everyone on the Internet, yet the more they open those sites, the more vulnerable they can become to attackers of all sorts. In their latest book, Securing PHP Web Applications, Tricia and William Ballad argue that PHP is an inherently insecure language, and they attempt to arm PHP programmers with the knowledge and techniques for making the sites they develop as secure as possible, short of disconnecting them from the Internet." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Securing PHP Web Applications author Tricia Ballad, William Ballad pages 336 publisher Addison-Wesley Professional rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0321534347 summary A wide-ranging guide to PHP security. The book was published by Addison-Wesley on 26 December 2008, under the ISBN 978-0321534347. The publisher maintains a Web page for the book, where visitors will find a detailed description, the table of contents, and a sample chapter ("Cross-Site Scripting," Chapter 10) only three pages in length — undoubtedly a record. That is essentially all one will find on that Web page. Most technical publishers offer far more information on the Web pages for each one of their books — such as the preface and index online, updates to the book's content (including reported errata, confirmed and otherwise), descriptions of the chapters, information about and pictures of the author(s), feedback from readers and the media, and, perhaps most valuable of all, the sample code used in the given book. (However, that is less of a factor with this particular book, since it does not contain much sample code.) Many such publisher pages even have links to book- or technology-specific forums, where readers can post questions to the authors, and read other people's questions and the replies. Addison-Wesley, like all of the Pearson Education imprints, has through the years proven quite sparing with the supplementary online content, thereby no doubt reducing the number of prospective readers and other traffic to their sites.

Despite its fairly modest length (336 pages) in comparison to the average programming book being published these days, Securing PHP Web Applications tries to cover a sizable number of topics, in five parts, which encompass 17 chapters: general security issues; error handling; system calls; buffer overflows and sanitizing variables; input validation; file access; user authentication; encryption and passwords; sessions and attacks against them; cross-site scripting; securing Apache and MySQL; securing IIS and SQL Server; securing PHP; automated testing; exploit testing; designing a secure application; and hardening an existing application. The book concludes with an epilogue on professional habits to improve the security of one's applications, an appendix describing additional resources, a glossary, and an index. Throughout the book, the authors illustrate key ideas with the use of a sample application — in this case, a Web-based guest book.

The first chapter, which is the only one in the first part of the book, is rather brief, but does prime the reader for all the material that follows, because it explains the inherent security problems of Web applications, and explains the dangers of some of the inadequate measures that naive programmers can take, such as security through obscurity, and the common belief that hackers only go after major Web sites.

Chapter 2 focuses on error handling, but begins with an example of SQL injection, and how effective it can be against the first iteration of the guest book application code. The most potentially confusing part of the discussion is when the authors show an SQL injection attack that perverts an INSERT statement by injecting it with an SQL command to drop a table, and the two commands are separated by a semicolon. But then instead of discussing how multiple SQL statements can be separated by semicolons (well, depending upon one's server settings), they instead discuss separating PHP commands was semicolons, but not SQL commands. Nonetheless, readers will find some good advice on handling unexpected input and using a centralized error-handling mechanism, even if quite simple. Also, the question of whether or not to accept HTML in user input, is briefly addressed. However, the material would be more useful if the authors were to explain specifically when htmlspecialchars() should be used instead of htmlentities(). Also, the option of using standard bulletin board codes (such as [b]bold[/b]) should have been mentioned, if only briefly with references to outside resources. At the bottom of page 22, the bare regex following a !"~" is not valid PHP (or even Perl, which it much more resembles). Lastly, one should not follow the recommendation of providing absolutely no feedback to the user as to what characters were invalid in the text they entered. Hackers gain nothing from being told the obvious, that HTML tags are not allowed; but legitimate users will be incensed when told only that the system didn't understand their input, with no indication as to how to make it acceptable.

In the third chapter, the authors explain the obvious danger of using unsanitized user input within a call to the operating system, such as exec() or system(). The discussion here assumes that you are on a *nux server, not Windows. Two PHP commands are suggested for sanitizing user input, as well as the option and advantages of building a custom API that is limited to only the system calls that should ever be executed within your Web application. On page 33, their test code appears to assume that register_globals has been enabled (so the GET variables in the malicious URL are automatically instantiated and set to the values in the URL), which is disappointing for a book on PHP security, since the dangers inherent in register_globals are so severe that it is now disabled by default, is deprecated in PHP version 5.3.0, and will be completely removed in version 6.

In Chapter 4, readers get an overview of program and data storage on a computer, including buffers, stacks, and heaps, as groundwork for learning what buffer overflows are and how hackers can try to exploit them to execute database and operating system statements, including using your server as a staging point for remote exploits and denial-of-service attacks. The fifth chapter dovetails nicely with the previous one, because it discusses input validation, which is a key component of avoiding boundary condition attacks. The authors explain the importance of validating tainted data, using character length and regular expressions. One simple countermeasure to such attacks that the authors fail to mention, is simply setting a maximum input length ("maxlength") on HTML "input" tag fields. After all, most entry fields on forms are input tags — not textarea tags, for which the maxlength attribute only specifies wrapping. Using maxlength does not prevent manipulation of POST values, but does prevent the less knowledgeable attacker from overflowing input tag fields.

Chapter 6 explains the risks in working with local and remote files, and why it is critical to not allow mischievous users do such tricks as inserting a pathname in a filename, when your code is expecting only a simple filename. Unfortunately, some of the code and claims in this chapter are suspect: On page 70, the value of $path_to_uploaded_files is missing a needed trailing forward slash. The suggested method of processing malicious file paths could be made much more simple and secure with the use of basename(). The file_get_contents() attack shown on page 71 again seems to assume that register_globals is enabled; even if it were enabled, the exploit wouldn't work because $file is always set to a value in the script code. The authors seemingly believe that GET variables can override anything in a script. Nonetheless, their advice about handling user-uploaded files is spot on.

Part 4 of the book focuses on user security. The first of its chapters covers user authentication and authorization — combining the two for their sample application — and starting with usernames and passwords. Access denial due to invalid username or password is supposedly illustrated by Figure 7.2, but all that it illustrates is that a concept that needs no visual depiction is not made more clear by trying to represent it with a confusing image. The authors provide a thorough discussion of authentication purposes and methods, as well as password encryption and strength. Yet they provide no rationale for setting the default values for usernames, passwords, and e-mail addresses to " " simply because the columns are non-nullable. After all, a record would only be added to the table if those values were known. Also, in their validateUsernamePassword() function, they've mistakenly commented out the first "return FALSE;" and they create unused variables $username and $password.

Chapter 8 provides an overview of various types of encryption, particularly for passwords, and some recommendations for PHP-supported algorithms. One blemish in this discussion is the claim that the longer the key for decryption, the longer it will take for your application to load the data (presumably the encrypted text) — which doesn't make sense. Also, their password() and login() functions reference class member names of an object not yet defined or explained. Code out of context like this can be confusing to the reader.

Sessions are a key component of maintaining and securing the identity of an authenticated user as she goes from one page to another in your PHP application. In Chapter 9, the authors describe the three major categories of session attacks: fixation, hijacking, and injection. The next chapter addresses cross-site scripting (XSS), but runs only three pages, and provides no examples of an XSS attack, which would have been helpful for the reader to understand how such an attack could try to compromise his PHP code, and what sort of malicious code to look for in his site. However, references to four open source XSS filtering projects are provided, in case the reader would like to learn more about them.

The fifth part of the book is devoted to securing whichever server environment on which you choose to host your application — Apache and MySQL, or IIS and Microsoft SQL Server, as well as PHP. In the chapter on PHP, the authors present the Zend Core release of PHP, which can save developers time in installing components of the LAMP stack, and also save them from reinventing the wheel, by using the Zend Framework. Other techniques for hardening PHP are discussed. Chapters 14 and 15 explain how to use automated testing and exploit testing, to increase your application's security, using powerful exploit testing tools — free and proprietary.

The sixth and final part of the book contains two chapters, which purportedly discuss the advantages of designing security into a new application right from the start, and how to improve security in an application that has already been built. In the former chapter, the authors stress the importance of balancing no design ("Skip reading Slashdot for one day...") and too much design (i.e., stalling). But the material mostly consists of the basics of designing a Web application, with no new information on security, and concludes with a brief reiteration of security principles detailed in earlier chapters. The latter chapter offers some good advice on having separate development and test environments, in addition to the production environment. The principles expounded in each of the two chapters, do not overlap at all, and yet together they apply equally to new applications under development just as much as they do to finished applications; splitting the principles up does not make sense.

Sadly, the book does not live up to its potential. In general, much of the sample code is sloppy, as exemplified by the instances noted above. The authors and the technical reviewers should have tested the attacks, and thereby found which ones don't work. Even the HTML should not be used by any new Web developer as an example of quality code that adheres to leading standards. In the HTML that they have their sample PHP code generate, the tag attribute values are in single quotes, and not double, which means all of that code would need to be changed to make it compliant with XHTML 1.0. Moreover, by choosing to use single quotes for both the attribute values and the PHP strings, the authors end up having to escape every single attribute value quote mark, which wastes space and looks ridiculous. They repeat this at the end of Chapter 6, but this time with all double quotes. Also, some of the technical decisions are rather odd, such as their setting those default values to spaces in the user table, noted earlier. A few terms are used strangely, as well, such as their statement that IIS's footprint is the number of entry points to it; actually, a Web server software's footprint generally refers to how much memory it consumes. Every chapter ends with a summary, titled "Wrapping It Up," none of which add any value to the book. There are at least three technical errata in the book that should have been caught: spaces in "u + rwx, go + rx" (page 76), and the invalid addresses "www.blog/modsecurity.org" (page 215) and "www.ballad-nonfiction/SecuringPHP/" (page 288; adding ."com" does not fix it).

On the other hand, the book's marketing copy claims that "Tricia and William Ballad demystify PHP security by presenting realistic scenarios and code examples, practical checklists, detailed visuals..." and that is certainly a fair claim. Most of the explanations are straightforward and informative. As a side note, kudos to Addison-Wesley for printing this book on recycled paper; one can only hope that all publishers adopt that policy.

The primary value of Securing PHP Web Applications is that it touches upon security topics that are often glossed over or completely neglected in other PHP security books and articles. This is important, because online miscreants will be searching out every possible chink in your Web site's armor. You should do the same, before they strike — and this book shows how.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Securing PHP Web Applications from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "The owners and the developers of typical Web sites face a quandary, one often unrecognized and unstated: They generally want their sites' contents and functionality to be accessible to everyone on the Internet, yet the more they open those sites, the more vulnerable they can become to attackers of all sorts. In their latest book, Securing PHP Web Applications, Tricia and William Ballad argue that PHP is an inherently insecure language, and they attempt to arm PHP programmers with the knowledge and techniques for making the sites they develop as secure as possible, short of disconnecting them from the Internet." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Securing PHP Web Applications author Tricia Ballad, William Ballad pages 336 publisher Addison-Wesley Professional rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0321534347 summary A wide-ranging guide to PHP security. The book was published by Addison-Wesley on 26 December 2008, under the ISBN 978-0321534347. The publisher maintains a Web page for the book, where visitors will find a detailed description, the table of contents, and a sample chapter ("Cross-Site Scripting," Chapter 10) only three pages in length — undoubtedly a record. That is essentially all one will find on that Web page. Most technical publishers offer far more information on the Web pages for each one of their books — such as the preface and index online, updates to the book's content (including reported errata, confirmed and otherwise), descriptions of the chapters, information about and pictures of the author(s), feedback from readers and the media, and, perhaps most valuable of all, the sample code used in the given book. (However, that is less of a factor with this particular book, since it does not contain much sample code.) Many such publisher pages even have links to book- or technology-specific forums, where readers can post questions to the authors, and read other people's questions and the replies. Addison-Wesley, like all of the Pearson Education imprints, has through the years proven quite sparing with the supplementary online content, thereby no doubt reducing the number of prospective readers and other traffic to their sites.

Despite its fairly modest length (336 pages) in comparison to the average programming book being published these days, Securing PHP Web Applications tries to cover a sizable number of topics, in five parts, which encompass 17 chapters: general security issues; error handling; system calls; buffer overflows and sanitizing variables; input validation; file access; user authentication; encryption and passwords; sessions and attacks against them; cross-site scripting; securing Apache and MySQL; securing IIS and SQL Server; securing PHP; automated testing; exploit testing; designing a secure application; and hardening an existing application. The book concludes with an epilogue on professional habits to improve the security of one's applications, an appendix describing additional resources, a glossary, and an index. Throughout the book, the authors illustrate key ideas with the use of a sample application — in this case, a Web-based guest book.

The first chapter, which is the only one in the first part of the book, is rather brief, but does prime the reader for all the material that follows, because it explains the inherent security problems of Web applications, and explains the dangers of some of the inadequate measures that naive programmers can take, such as security through obscurity, and the common belief that hackers only go after major Web sites.

Chapter 2 focuses on error handling, but begins with an example of SQL injection, and how effective it can be against the first iteration of the guest book application code. The most potentially confusing part of the discussion is when the authors show an SQL injection attack that perverts an INSERT statement by injecting it with an SQL command to drop a table, and the two commands are separated by a semicolon. But then instead of discussing how multiple SQL statements can be separated by semicolons (well, depending upon one's server settings), they instead discuss separating PHP commands was semicolons, but not SQL commands. Nonetheless, readers will find some good advice on handling unexpected input and using a centralized error-handling mechanism, even if quite simple. Also, the question of whether or not to accept HTML in user input, is briefly addressed. However, the material would be more useful if the authors were to explain specifically when htmlspecialchars() should be used instead of htmlentities(). Also, the option of using standard bulletin board codes (such as [b]bold[/b]) should have been mentioned, if only briefly with references to outside resources. At the bottom of page 22, the bare regex following a !"~" is not valid PHP (or even Perl, which it much more resembles). Lastly, one should not follow the recommendation of providing absolutely no feedback to the user as to what characters were invalid in the text they entered. Hackers gain nothing from being told the obvious, that HTML tags are not allowed; but legitimate users will be incensed when told only that the system didn't understand their input, with no indication as to how to make it acceptable.

In the third chapter, the authors explain the obvious danger of using unsanitized user input within a call to the operating system, such as exec() or system(). The discussion here assumes that you are on a *nux server, not Windows. Two PHP commands are suggested for sanitizing user input, as well as the option and advantages of building a custom API that is limited to only the system calls that should ever be executed within your Web application. On page 33, their test code appears to assume that register_globals has been enabled (so the GET variables in the malicious URL are automatically instantiated and set to the values in the URL), which is disappointing for a book on PHP security, since the dangers inherent in register_globals are so severe that it is now disabled by default, is deprecated in PHP version 5.3.0, and will be completely removed in version 6.

In Chapter 4, readers get an overview of program and data storage on a computer, including buffers, stacks, and heaps, as groundwork for learning what buffer overflows are and how hackers can try to exploit them to execute database and operating system statements, including using your server as a staging point for remote exploits and denial-of-service attacks. The fifth chapter dovetails nicely with the previous one, because it discusses input validation, which is a key component of avoiding boundary condition attacks. The authors explain the importance of validating tainted data, using character length and regular expressions. One simple countermeasure to such attacks that the authors fail to mention, is simply setting a maximum input length ("maxlength") on HTML "input" tag fields. After all, most entry fields on forms are input tags — not textarea tags, for which the maxlength attribute only specifies wrapping. Using maxlength does not prevent manipulation of POST values, but does prevent the less knowledgeable attacker from overflowing input tag fields.

Chapter 6 explains the risks in working with local and remote files, and why it is critical to not allow mischievous users do such tricks as inserting a pathname in a filename, when your code is expecting only a simple filename. Unfortunately, some of the code and claims in this chapter are suspect: On page 70, the value of $path_to_uploaded_files is missing a needed trailing forward slash. The suggested method of processing malicious file paths could be made much more simple and secure with the use of basename(). The file_get_contents() attack shown on page 71 again seems to assume that register_globals is enabled; even if it were enabled, the exploit wouldn't work because $file is always set to a value in the script code. The authors seemingly believe that GET variables can override anything in a script. Nonetheless, their advice about handling user-uploaded files is spot on.

Part 4 of the book focuses on user security. The first of its chapters covers user authentication and authorization — combining the two for their sample application — and starting with usernames and passwords. Access denial due to invalid username or password is supposedly illustrated by Figure 7.2, but all that it illustrates is that a concept that needs no visual depiction is not made more clear by trying to represent it with a confusing image. The authors provide a thorough discussion of authentication purposes and methods, as well as password encryption and strength. Yet they provide no rationale for setting the default values for usernames, passwords, and e-mail addresses to " " simply because the columns are non-nullable. After all, a record would only be added to the table if those values were known. Also, in their validateUsernamePassword() function, they've mistakenly commented out the first "return FALSE;" and they create unused variables $username and $password.

Chapter 8 provides an overview of various types of encryption, particularly for passwords, and some recommendations for PHP-supported algorithms. One blemish in this discussion is the claim that the longer the key for decryption, the longer it will take for your application to load the data (presumably the encrypted text) — which doesn't make sense. Also, their password() and login() functions reference class member names of an object not yet defined or explained. Code out of context like this can be confusing to the reader.

Sessions are a key component of maintaining and securing the identity of an authenticated user as she goes from one page to another in your PHP application. In Chapter 9, the authors describe the three major categories of session attacks: fixation, hijacking, and injection. The next chapter addresses cross-site scripting (XSS), but runs only three pages, and provides no examples of an XSS attack, which would have been helpful for the reader to understand how such an attack could try to compromise his PHP code, and what sort of malicious code to look for in his site. However, references to four open source XSS filtering projects are provided, in case the reader would like to learn more about them.

The fifth part of the book is devoted to securing whichever server environment on which you choose to host your application — Apache and MySQL, or IIS and Microsoft SQL Server, as well as PHP. In the chapter on PHP, the authors present the Zend Core release of PHP, which can save developers time in installing components of the LAMP stack, and also save them from reinventing the wheel, by using the Zend Framework. Other techniques for hardening PHP are discussed. Chapters 14 and 15 explain how to use automated testing and exploit testing, to increase your application's security, using powerful exploit testing tools — free and proprietary.

The sixth and final part of the book contains two chapters, which purportedly discuss the advantages of designing security into a new application right from the start, and how to improve security in an application that has already been built. In the former chapter, the authors stress the importance of balancing no design ("Skip reading Slashdot for one day...") and too much design (i.e., stalling). But the material mostly consists of the basics of designing a Web application, with no new information on security, and concludes with a brief reiteration of security principles detailed in earlier chapters. The latter chapter offers some good advice on having separate development and test environments, in addition to the production environment. The principles expounded in each of the two chapters, do not overlap at all, and yet together they apply equally to new applications under development just as much as they do to finished applications; splitting the principles up does not make sense.

Sadly, the book does not live up to its potential. In general, much of the sample code is sloppy, as exemplified by the instances noted above. The authors and the technical reviewers should have tested the attacks, and thereby found which ones don't work. Even the HTML should not be used by any new Web developer as an example of quality code that adheres to leading standards. In the HTML that they have their sample PHP code generate, the tag attribute values are in single quotes, and not double, which means all of that code would need to be changed to make it compliant with XHTML 1.0. Moreover, by choosing to use single quotes for both the attribute values and the PHP strings, the authors end up having to escape every single attribute value quote mark, which wastes space and looks ridiculous. They repeat this at the end of Chapter 6, but this time with all double quotes. Also, some of the technical decisions are rather odd, such as their setting those default values to spaces in the user table, noted earlier. A few terms are used strangely, as well, such as their statement that IIS's footprint is the number of entry points to it; actually, a Web server software's footprint generally refers to how much memory it consumes. Every chapter ends with a summary, titled "Wrapping It Up," none of which add any value to the book. There are at least three technical errata in the book that should have been caught: spaces in "u + rwx, go + rx" (page 76), and the invalid addresses "www.blog/modsecurity.org" (page 215) and "www.ballad-nonfiction/SecuringPHP/" (page 288; adding ."com" does not fix it).

On the other hand, the book's marketing copy claims that "Tricia and William Ballad demystify PHP security by presenting realistic scenarios and code examples, practical checklists, detailed visuals..." and that is certainly a fair claim. Most of the explanations are straightforward and informative. As a side note, kudos to Addison-Wesley for printing this book on recycled paper; one can only hope that all publishers adopt that policy.

The primary value of Securing PHP Web Applications is that it touches upon security topics that are often glossed over or completely neglected in other PHP security books and articles. This is important, because online miscreants will be searching out every possible chink in your Web site's armor. You should do the same, before they strike — and this book shows how.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Securing PHP Web Applications from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Every major content management system (CMS) offers considerable functionality for building Web sites out of the box. But to get the most out of any CMS, its functionality must be extended through the addition of modules, most of which are created by third-party developers. For instance, a given CMS may need to be supplemented by an e-commerce module in order to use that CMS for building an online store. Joomla, one of the most widely used CMSs, is no exception. Web developers interested in creating their own Joomla extensions can read Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development, authored by Joseph LeBlanc." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development author Joseph LeBlanc pages 284 publisher Packt Publishing rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1847196200 summary An introductory guide to creating Joomla extensions. Released by Packt Publishing on 11 December 2008, with the ISBN 978-1847196200, this book can be considered the second edition of LeBlanc's previous effort, Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development: Creating Modules, Components, and Plugins with PHP, published almost exactly one year earlier. Oddly, this second edition has the same title as the first (though a different subtitle), and yet is not identified by the publisher as a second edition. This is not the first Packt Publishing book whose second edition was instead given a slightly different name — a practice that may prove confusing to readers who could be uncertain as to whether an older book by the same author contains different material and thus should be purchased as a supplement to the newer book.

Nonetheless, this revised edition strengthens Packt Publishing's position as a leading — if not the preeminent — publisher of technical books devoted to CMSs. The firm makes available a Web page for the book that offers a detailed description, the table of contents, all of the sample code used in the book, and a free sample chapter ("Using JavaScript Effects," Chapter 8). There are links for submitting feedback, contacting the publisher with a question, and ordering the electronic version of the book, which is now available at a reduced price — even more so when purchased with the print version. Errata are not available on this book-specific page, but instead can only be accessed through the Packt Publishing support page, where the visitor has to find the particular book again. The publisher should move the links for sample code, errata, and feedback, to each book's individual page. As of this writing, no errata have been reported for this second edition.

At 284 pages, Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development is certainly not overwhelming in size. In fact, one of the most common complaints about the first edition was its small size (176 pages). The revised edition's material is organized into a dozen chapters, covering a range of topics: an overview of Joomla and extensions; starting to create the example extension; interfacing with the Joomla database, and MVC; creating a front-end interface; use of JavaScript classes; a module for listing pages; user interface enhancements to the extension; JavaScript effects; creating three example plug-ins; adding configuration parameters; adding e-mail and internationalization features; and bundling all of the created elements into a Joomla archive file for distribution.

As with most if not all similar Joomla books, Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development assumes that the reader has a solid understanding of PHP and MySQL, as well as some familiarity with administering a Joomla site. Absolutely no prior knowledge of Joomla extension development is required, and as a consequence this book can be a guide for any PHP programmer who knows how to install and administer Joomla, and wishes to take it to the next level through the development of custom Joomla extensions.

In the book's first chapter, LeBlanc explains the purpose of extending Joomla, and the advantages of this approach over hacking the Joomla core code in order to customize a site's functionality — a principle that should be known by any developer familiar with CMSs. He briefly discusses how Joomla extensions fall into five categories: components, modules, plug-ins, templates, and languages. The chapter continues with brief descriptions of what the subsequent chapters will cover — much of which is redundant, since that is already covered in the preface. This unsubstantial chapter next presents a brief mention of the example project to be created throughout the book (a restaurant reviews site), but offers no project requirements, constraints, or design parameters. Also noted are the requisite technologies one will need for creating the project on one's own: a Web server, PHP, MySQL, and Joomla 1.5. This chapter, like all others, ends with a chapter summary.

With Chapter 2, the author and the reader get into the actual technical content of the book — and not a moment too soon, having at this point passed more than five percent of the pages that follow the table of contents. This chapter's material should be especially welcome to any reader completely unfamiliar with Joomla components, because it explains how they are structured, how to execute them, the separation of front-end and back-end (administrator) directories, and how to register a component in the database (thereby enabling navigation to that component's page). Code and examples are provided that show how to create primary and secondary toolbars for the example project, as well as the native toolbar buttons. On page 17, the use of '_JEXEC' to prevent direct access to a Joomla PHP file, is explained three times; once would be enough. In fact, most if not all times that this (recommendable) technique appears in code in later chapters, its purpose is explained all over again.

One of the essential chapters for getting started on the example project, is the third, which discusses back-end development for the project, beginning first with the database table and its corresponding JTable class, for holding the restaurant reviews information. The discussion of best practices for a table prefix is a good idea, but many readers would most likely have appreciated some illustrative use of the inherited JTable methods. Next, the author briefly describes how the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern can be used to simplify the code that will be written for the example project, and then explains the basic ideas of MVC, even more briefly. Naturally, the order of these two discussions should have been reversed. The chapter concludes with coverage of the Joomla code for creating the project's forms, as well as processing and managing the data.

With the fourth chapter, LeBlanc temporarily switches to front-end development, and demonstrates the Joomla code that allows visitors to the example project site to see a list of restaurant reviews, view the details of each, read comments posted by other visitors, and post their own comments. In addition, the use of search-engine-friendly (SEF) links is explored, including how to create and parse the needed HTTP request variables' parts.

In the subsequent chapter, the author steps the reader through the process of implementing profiles of restaurant critics in the example project — and in turn illustrates how to override JTable methods, sort records comprising database query results, track how many times particular records are viewed, implement record check-out and check-in functionality (for collaborative editing), store user information, generate page elements using the JHTML class, and enable user ordering of displayed records by using the JPagination class.

Module development is the focus of the sixth chapter, which explains how to register a new module in the Joomla database, how to create and configure one, and how to build and use a helper class. In Chapter 7, the lengthiest of all, the author explains how to: modify a controller to publish and unpublish articles (with a nice example of making a function more generic), delete database records, prompt the user with a confirmation dialog box, redirect the user to an alternate page, require user input for form fields using JavaScript, paginate any large number of records when output, search all available records and display the results, place toolbars within views, and implement user comments. On page 133, when LeBlanc states that "the backend does not work with JavaScript turned off," he should clarify whether he is referring to the Joomla administrative back-end or the example project back-end.

As Web developers increasingly utilize JavaScript libraries within their Web-based applications, the same is happening within the major CMSs, including Joomla and Drupal. In Chapter 8, LeBlanc shows how Joomla programmers can use JavaScript for creating modal boxes (using either raw HTML or views), tool tips, sliding panes, and Google Maps integrated with one's Joomla site. In the discussion of configuring modal boxes, the height and width parameters in the sample code certainly do not match the appearance of the figure on page 167. While most of the chapter makes use of the (native) MooTools library, this portion of the book is capped off with an examination of an alternative, jQuery, which is becoming quite popular. The author wisely provides some valuable advice to any reader considering using both JavaScript libraries simultaneously.

In Chapter 9, the focus shifts back toward more conventional Joomla extension topics — specifically, plug-ins. The author shows how to register new plug-ins in a Joomla database, how to create them, and what events can be registered (as functions in your plug-in), such as a user logging in or content being output. This knowledge is applied to creating plug-ins for the example project in order to support advanced searching of content, and for content authors to be able to have an example site automatically generate an information box when it detects specially tagged text in the content, before outputting it.

PHP programmers new to creating their own Joomla extensions, oftentimes struggle with figuring out how best to specify configuration settings so they are not buried in the code itself nor need to be added manually through MySQL queries — and, in turn, how to make it as easy as possible for those settings to be specified by any developer or site administrator who is using the custom extension. Chapter 10 shows how to do just that, with the information divided among the three types of Joomla extensions that most commonly need this flexibility: modules, plug-ins, and components.

Chapter 11 is somewhat like a catch-all repository for some miscellaneous topics: Leveraging Joomla's native article e-mailing functionality, Joomla extensions can be further enhanced by allowing the user to e-mail component content to other people. Joomla has built-in internationalization, allowing you to supplement any installable language packs with phrases for your custom extension's front-end and back-end user interface text — for any of the languages you choose to support. LeBlanc shows how to do that, for his example project. He also shows how to safely allow users to upload files to your Joomla server.

The final chapter of the book demonstrates how to package up all of the code and other files that you have created, so anyone else who wants to leverage that functionality can install your extension in their own Joomla-based Web site.

The book has a number of small blemishes, including several errata, e.g., "can [be] defined" (page 20), "set these variables to whatever value[s]" (page 31), "it the function proceeds" (page 74), "!." (page 76), "existing/modules" (page 112), and "contain[s] newlines" (page 238). There is the occasional erroneous capitalization of words (witness the first sentence in the "About the Reviewer" section), incorrect use of hyphens for creating adjectives, and inconsistent spelling of words (such as "back-end" and "backend"). All of these should have been caught by the publisher's line editors.

In some passages there is a dearth of commas that would help the reader know when to pause. The code formatting, such as indentation and brace placement, is not always consistent (e.g., pages 81 and 116). The chapter subheads should be in title case, but are instead in sentence case. Some of the HTML example code suffers from "div-itis," such as the use of div tags instead of label tags where appropriate (e.g., page 66). The Joomla root URL on the reader's local Web server — assumed by the author in all of the subsequent project URLs throughout the book — should have been mentioned in the first chapter, when discussing the prerequisite technologies for creating the example project, because that is the point in the book at which the reader would most likely have installed Joomla on their server.

All of the chapter summaries simply add bulk but no value to the book, and should be chopped, because the chapters are short enough to not justify any summarization. Moreover, in at least one instance (Chapter 10), the summary contains higher-level perspective not presented in the chapter itself, where it would be far more timely to the reader. In addition, the book provides apparently no figure numbers or captions, which arguably saves space, since readers rarely refer to them if they are reading the text closely, though less so when skimming through a technical book. Compared to its predecessor, this edition would still benefit from a lay-flat binding, and it still has the pointless header and footer lines, as well as page number bracketing (which admittedly seems to be part of the publisher's branding).

None of the aforesaid problems are of any gravity. The main problem with the book is that far too many of the discussions are rather cursory and fast-paced, lacking in both clear explanations of critical concepts and also an empathy for readers struggling to understand those concepts. For instance, the marketing copy for the book claims that the reader will learn the Model-View-Controller design pattern, when in fact the book fails to teach it well — instead only offering two foodservice examples, which are inadequate, particularly for any reader unfamiliar with design patterns in general. In other words, there is adequate explanation as to the specific steps for creating the example project code and other needed elements, but there is not enough explanation as to how those steps fit into the bigger picture, and how they could be enlarged so that the budding Joomla developer could create his or her own extensions, quite different from the book's example project.

On the other hand, this new version has several notable improvements over the previous edition, such as greater emphasis on Joomla 1.5-style coding, as well as more attractive screenshots, with far less pixelation. More importantly, there are three new chapters, addressing JTable, JHTML, JUser, JavaScript, e-mail, languages, and file uploading. As in the first edition of the book, LeBlanc opts for a nice balance of exposition, example code, and illustrative figures — along with the bolding of any changes in code shown in multiple places. Scattered throughout the book are handy tips and warnings to Joomla developers. Joomla's online documentation for extension development is not much better than it was a year ago, and thus there is still a need for helpful books such as this one.

On balance, Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development is an approachable and useful resource for any developer who wants to maximize the functionality of their own Joomla-based Web sites — and perhaps share that new functionality with other developers by contributing the resultant extensions to the Joomla community.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Every major content management system (CMS) offers considerable functionality for building Web sites out of the box. But to get the most out of any CMS, its functionality must be extended through the addition of modules, most of which are created by third-party developers. For instance, a given CMS may need to be supplemented by an e-commerce module in order to use that CMS for building an online store. Joomla, one of the most widely used CMSs, is no exception. Web developers interested in creating their own Joomla extensions can read Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development, authored by Joseph LeBlanc." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development author Joseph LeBlanc pages 284 publisher Packt Publishing rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1847196200 summary An introductory guide to creating Joomla extensions. Released by Packt Publishing on 11 December 2008, with the ISBN 978-1847196200, this book can be considered the second edition of LeBlanc's previous effort, Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development: Creating Modules, Components, and Plugins with PHP, published almost exactly one year earlier. Oddly, this second edition has the same title as the first (though a different subtitle), and yet is not identified by the publisher as a second edition. This is not the first Packt Publishing book whose second edition was instead given a slightly different name — a practice that may prove confusing to readers who could be uncertain as to whether an older book by the same author contains different material and thus should be purchased as a supplement to the newer book.

Nonetheless, this revised edition strengthens Packt Publishing's position as a leading — if not the preeminent — publisher of technical books devoted to CMSs. The firm makes available a Web page for the book that offers a detailed description, the table of contents, all of the sample code used in the book, and a free sample chapter ("Using JavaScript Effects," Chapter 8). There are links for submitting feedback, contacting the publisher with a question, and ordering the electronic version of the book, which is now available at a reduced price — even more so when purchased with the print version. Errata are not available on this book-specific page, but instead can only be accessed through the Packt Publishing support page, where the visitor has to find the particular book again. The publisher should move the links for sample code, errata, and feedback, to each book's individual page. As of this writing, no errata have been reported for this second edition.

At 284 pages, Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development is certainly not overwhelming in size. In fact, one of the most common complaints about the first edition was its small size (176 pages). The revised edition's material is organized into a dozen chapters, covering a range of topics: an overview of Joomla and extensions; starting to create the example extension; interfacing with the Joomla database, and MVC; creating a front-end interface; use of JavaScript classes; a module for listing pages; user interface enhancements to the extension; JavaScript effects; creating three example plug-ins; adding configuration parameters; adding e-mail and internationalization features; and bundling all of the created elements into a Joomla archive file for distribution.

As with most if not all similar Joomla books, Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development assumes that the reader has a solid understanding of PHP and MySQL, as well as some familiarity with administering a Joomla site. Absolutely no prior knowledge of Joomla extension development is required, and as a consequence this book can be a guide for any PHP programmer who knows how to install and administer Joomla, and wishes to take it to the next level through the development of custom Joomla extensions.

In the book's first chapter, LeBlanc explains the purpose of extending Joomla, and the advantages of this approach over hacking the Joomla core code in order to customize a site's functionality — a principle that should be known by any developer familiar with CMSs. He briefly discusses how Joomla extensions fall into five categories: components, modules, plug-ins, templates, and languages. The chapter continues with brief descriptions of what the subsequent chapters will cover — much of which is redundant, since that is already covered in the preface. This unsubstantial chapter next presents a brief mention of the example project to be created throughout the book (a restaurant reviews site), but offers no project requirements, constraints, or design parameters. Also noted are the requisite technologies one will need for creating the project on one's own: a Web server, PHP, MySQL, and Joomla 1.5. This chapter, like all others, ends with a chapter summary.

With Chapter 2, the author and the reader get into the actual technical content of the book — and not a moment too soon, having at this point passed more than five percent of the pages that follow the table of contents. This chapter's material should be especially welcome to any reader completely unfamiliar with Joomla components, because it explains how they are structured, how to execute them, the separation of front-end and back-end (administrator) directories, and how to register a component in the database (thereby enabling navigation to that component's page). Code and examples are provided that show how to create primary and secondary toolbars for the example project, as well as the native toolbar buttons. On page 17, the use of '_JEXEC' to prevent direct access to a Joomla PHP file, is explained three times; once would be enough. In fact, most if not all times that this (recommendable) technique appears in code in later chapters, its purpose is explained all over again.

One of the essential chapters for getting started on the example project, is the third, which discusses back-end development for the project, beginning first with the database table and its corresponding JTable class, for holding the restaurant reviews information. The discussion of best practices for a table prefix is a good idea, but many readers would most likely have appreciated some illustrative use of the inherited JTable methods. Next, the author briefly describes how the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern can be used to simplify the code that will be written for the example project, and then explains the basic ideas of MVC, even more briefly. Naturally, the order of these two discussions should have been reversed. The chapter concludes with coverage of the Joomla code for creating the project's forms, as well as processing and managing the data.

With the fourth chapter, LeBlanc temporarily switches to front-end development, and demonstrates the Joomla code that allows visitors to the example project site to see a list of restaurant reviews, view the details of each, read comments posted by other visitors, and post their own comments. In addition, the use of search-engine-friendly (SEF) links is explored, including how to create and parse the needed HTTP request variables' parts.

In the subsequent chapter, the author steps the reader through the process of implementing profiles of restaurant critics in the example project — and in turn illustrates how to override JTable methods, sort records comprising database query results, track how many times particular records are viewed, implement record check-out and check-in functionality (for collaborative editing), store user information, generate page elements using the JHTML class, and enable user ordering of displayed records by using the JPagination class.

Module development is the focus of the sixth chapter, which explains how to register a new module in the Joomla database, how to create and configure one, and how to build and use a helper class. In Chapter 7, the lengthiest of all, the author explains how to: modify a controller to publish and unpublish articles (with a nice example of making a function more generic), delete database records, prompt the user with a confirmation dialog box, redirect the user to an alternate page, require user input for form fields using JavaScript, paginate any large number of records when output, search all available records and display the results, place toolbars within views, and implement user comments. On page 133, when LeBlanc states that "the backend does not work with JavaScript turned off," he should clarify whether he is referring to the Joomla administrative back-end or the example project back-end.

As Web developers increasingly utilize JavaScript libraries within their Web-based applications, the same is happening within the major CMSs, including Joomla and Drupal. In Chapter 8, LeBlanc shows how Joomla programmers can use JavaScript for creating modal boxes (using either raw HTML or views), tool tips, sliding panes, and Google Maps integrated with one's Joomla site. In the discussion of configuring modal boxes, the height and width parameters in the sample code certainly do not match the appearance of the figure on page 167. While most of the chapter makes use of the (native) MooTools library, this portion of the book is capped off with an examination of an alternative, jQuery, which is becoming quite popular. The author wisely provides some valuable advice to any reader considering using both JavaScript libraries simultaneously.

In Chapter 9, the focus shifts back toward more conventional Joomla extension topics — specifically, plug-ins. The author shows how to register new plug-ins in a Joomla database, how to create them, and what events can be registered (as functions in your plug-in), such as a user logging in or content being output. This knowledge is applied to creating plug-ins for the example project in order to support advanced searching of content, and for content authors to be able to have an example site automatically generate an information box when it detects specially tagged text in the content, before outputting it.

PHP programmers new to creating their own Joomla extensions, oftentimes struggle with figuring out how best to specify configuration settings so they are not buried in the code itself nor need to be added manually through MySQL queries — and, in turn, how to make it as easy as possible for those settings to be specified by any developer or site administrator who is using the custom extension. Chapter 10 shows how to do just that, with the information divided among the three types of Joomla extensions that most commonly need this flexibility: modules, plug-ins, and components.

Chapter 11 is somewhat like a catch-all repository for some miscellaneous topics: Leveraging Joomla's native article e-mailing functionality, Joomla extensions can be further enhanced by allowing the user to e-mail component content to other people. Joomla has built-in internationalization, allowing you to supplement any installable language packs with phrases for your custom extension's front-end and back-end user interface text — for any of the languages you choose to support. LeBlanc shows how to do that, for his example project. He also shows how to safely allow users to upload files to your Joomla server.

The final chapter of the book demonstrates how to package up all of the code and other files that you have created, so anyone else who wants to leverage that functionality can install your extension in their own Joomla-based Web site.

The book has a number of small blemishes, including several errata, e.g., "can [be] defined" (page 20), "set these variables to whatever value[s]" (page 31), "it the function proceeds" (page 74), "!." (page 76), "existing/modules" (page 112), and "contain[s] newlines" (page 238). There is the occasional erroneous capitalization of words (witness the first sentence in the "About the Reviewer" section), incorrect use of hyphens for creating adjectives, and inconsistent spelling of words (such as "back-end" and "backend"). All of these should have been caught by the publisher's line editors.

In some passages there is a dearth of commas that would help the reader know when to pause. The code formatting, such as indentation and brace placement, is not always consistent (e.g., pages 81 and 116). The chapter subheads should be in title case, but are instead in sentence case. Some of the HTML example code suffers from "div-itis," such as the use of div tags instead of label tags where appropriate (e.g., page 66). The Joomla root URL on the reader's local Web server — assumed by the author in all of the subsequent project URLs throughout the book — should have been mentioned in the first chapter, when discussing the prerequisite technologies for creating the example project, because that is the point in the book at which the reader would most likely have installed Joomla on their server.

All of the chapter summaries simply add bulk but no value to the book, and should be chopped, because the chapters are short enough to not justify any summarization. Moreover, in at least one instance (Chapter 10), the summary contains higher-level perspective not presented in the chapter itself, where it would be far more timely to the reader. In addition, the book provides apparently no figure numbers or captions, which arguably saves space, since readers rarely refer to them if they are reading the text closely, though less so when skimming through a technical book. Compared to its predecessor, this edition would still benefit from a lay-flat binding, and it still has the pointless header and footer lines, as well as page number bracketing (which admittedly seems to be part of the publisher's branding).

None of the aforesaid problems are of any gravity. The main problem with the book is that far too many of the discussions are rather cursory and fast-paced, lacking in both clear explanations of critical concepts and also an empathy for readers struggling to understand those concepts. For instance, the marketing copy for the book claims that the reader will learn the Model-View-Controller design pattern, when in fact the book fails to teach it well — instead only offering two foodservice examples, which are inadequate, particularly for any reader unfamiliar with design patterns in general. In other words, there is adequate explanation as to the specific steps for creating the example project code and other needed elements, but there is not enough explanation as to how those steps fit into the bigger picture, and how they could be enlarged so that the budding Joomla developer could create his or her own extensions, quite different from the book's example project.

On the other hand, this new version has several notable improvements over the previous edition, such as greater emphasis on Joomla 1.5-style coding, as well as more attractive screenshots, with far less pixelation. More importantly, there are three new chapters, addressing JTable, JHTML, JUser, JavaScript, e-mail, languages, and file uploading. As in the first edition of the book, LeBlanc opts for a nice balance of exposition, example code, and illustrative figures — along with the bolding of any changes in code shown in multiple places. Scattered throughout the book are handy tips and warnings to Joomla developers. Joomla's online documentation for extension development is not much better than it was a year ago, and thus there is still a need for helpful books such as this one.

On balance, Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development is an approachable and useful resource for any developer who wants to maximize the functionality of their own Joomla-based Web sites — and perhaps share that new functionality with other developers by contributing the resultant extensions to the Joomla community.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "After installing and learning the basics of the content management system Drupal, many Web developers do not know how to best proceed from there. They may realize that much of the programming potential of Drupal — and thus the earning potential of Drupal developers — is derived from the use of community-contributed modules that greatly extend Drupal's power. But there are thousands of such modules, with no objective direction as to which ones are best suited for particular tasks, and what bugs and other flaws could trip up the developer. These programmers need a thorough guide as to which modules are the most promising for the development of the most common types of Web sites. A new book, Using Drupal, aims to fill this need." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Using Drupal author Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, James Walker, and Jeff Robbins pages 490 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0596515805 summary Key contributed Drupal modules put to use creating sample sites. Published by O'Reilly Media on 16 December 2008, under the ISBN 978-0596515805, the book is authored by Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, James Walker, and Jeff Robbins — all of whom are affiliated with Lullabot and are actively involved in the Drupal community and knowledgeable about Drupal's core and plug-in modules. Despite the old adage about having too many cooks in the kitchen, a technical book of this nature should benefit from having half a dozen authors, since each one will have his or her fortes, and the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts, as a result of this complementary expertise.

This title appears to be O'Reilly's first — and, as of this writing, only — Drupal book. This is in no way astonishing, given that O'Reilly has never been known for pushing books too quickly through development and production, simply to gain "first mover advantage." Rather, they generally work to create higher-quality efforts that will better stand the test of time — unlike the "shovel" books that some other publishers tend to push out the door, with less coherence and more errata. As a consequence, in the technical libraries of veteran programmers, one tends to see a disproportionately high number of book covers sporting pictures of animals.

On the publisher's Web page for Using Drupal, visitors can read the book's description, table of contents, colophon, errata (of which there are currently several), a link for purchasing the book in electronic form (in formats such as PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket), and a link for viewing the book immediately online, in the Safari Books Online system. There is a simple forum for the book, which currently contains seven posts, three of which already have replies from one of the book's authors and from an O'Reilly community manager. There is a browse system that allows the visitor to read portions of each section of each chapter, and thus preview the book before purchasing it. It even includes the illustrations within each previewed section, but for some reason does not include the figure numbers within the captions.

The authors have created their own site dedicated to the book, where visitors will find brief author biographies largely similar to those found at the very end of the book, with links to the authors' profile pages on Drupal.org. Lastly, there is a download page for the source code, which comprises a copy of Drupal 6, all of the contributed modules and themes needed to complete the hands-on exercises, and the supplementary resource files for those exercises, such as logos and product images. There is a change log for the download file, and yet no mention on the page — or even in the book itself, as far as I can tell — as to which version in the 6.x release series was used for the book and in the download package.

Oddly, neither the publisher's site nor the authors' site appears to mention the free downloadable chapter (Chapter 9, "Event Management"), although it is offered in an article posted in the blog section of Do It with Drupal.

After a foreword by Dries Buytaert — Drupal's founder and project lead — the book continues for 490 pages in total, organized into eleven chapters and three appendices. Nine of the chapters each begin with a description of a case study that will be used for illustrative purposes, followed by some implementation notes, which includes discussion of the candidate modules that could be used for this particular case study, and the trade-offs among them. The contributed modules that are chosen for the implementation and their capabilities are summarized, and then further explained with hands-on exercises — in which the particular modules are utilized and configured. Each of these nine chapters takes the reader through the development of a complete Web site, and is wrapped up with discussion of additional modules applicable to the kind of Web site being created. In Chapters 2 through 10, the case studies are: a simple Drupal site that supports client editing, a job posting board, a product reviews site, a wiki, a site for managing publishing workflow, a photo gallery, multilingual sites, an entertainment events management site, and an online store. Chapter 1 provides an overview of Drupal — covering modules, users, nodes, organizational schemes, and content types — preceded by a brief history of content management systems. Chapter 11 explores site theming, with details on the files and other elements that make up a theme, and how to customize them. The book's three appendices cover installing and upgrading Drupal, choosing the right modules for a job, and a list of the modules and themes used in the book.

The book's material is current with Drupal version 6, but should be of some value to any developer opting, for whatever reason, to stick with version 5. Speaking of versions, the authors should have mentioned which version of Drupal they chose, including the minor release number. The Drupal code in the aforesaid download package indicates that the chosen version is 6.4.

This book is unique, in that most if not all other Drupal books on the market are either introductory in nature — which at best devote only a single chapter to discussing third-party modules contributed by developers — or more advanced, specializing in a particular subject area, such as Drupal site security or e-commerce. Using Drupal, just as the title indicates, examines the detailed usage of best-of-breed modules to accomplish specific goals that one often encounters as a Web developer.

One of the most valuable aspects of software development books written by veteran programmers, is their discussions of various solutions to a particular problem — regardless of its size or complexity — and the reasons why they chose one approach instead of any of the others. Using Drupal is no exception. The authors examine the advantages and disadvantages of various third-party modules, even those that were not chosen for implementing the sample Web sites.

In any computer programming book, screenshots and other figures can be most helpful to the reader, because they reinforce the narrative descriptions of the cumulative results of all the steps up to that point. The screenshots are even valuable to someone following along on his own computer, because they provide immediate confirmation that he has not missed a critical step in the process. Using Drupal offers a generous amount of such screenshots, as well as information tables that help in visually breaking up the text. The only weakness with some of the screenshots is the lack of contrast between the text and the background, resulting in a dark gray shown on a light gray background — not always clearly readable.

The book is substantial in length and content, and naturally it cannot adequately cover dozens of sorts of Web sites. But clearly the book would have been more complete if it contained a chapter explaining how to allow content to be viewable by a limited set of authenticated users. An ideal case study for this would be the implementation of an e-zine site, for which prospective subscribers could view the homepage and other marketing material, but only subscribers could read the actual e-zine's contents. Even better would be to make this sample site fee-based, and show how to accept payments through PayPal (or some other payment systems for which there are Drupal modules) and possibly validate new subscribers automatically and instantly, using PayPal's IPN feature.

The flaws of this book are few and minor. There are unreported errata, most of them grammatical — e.g., "as [the] ability" (page 10) and "modules [that] were" (page 89) — which are to be expected in the first edition of any technical book. Speaking of errata, on the publisher's Web site, the errata should be sorted — or sortable — by page number, so it is much faster for people to see if a discovered erratum has already been reported. In addition, the URLs within the book that do not contain any filename (e.g., "http://www.example.com"; page 8) are in most if not all cases missing the trailing "/" (the root directory). Yet my primary complaint pertains to its production, and not its writing: For countless lines within the text, the spaces separating the words are too narrow, making it difficult to distinguish the words from one another when reading rapidly. As a consequence, each one of these lines almost appears to be a single word. (Skilled programmers know the great value of using whitespace in their code for enhancing readability; the same is certainly true for the printed word.) This readability problem is exacerbated by two factors: The ink color does not appear to be pure black, but instead a dark gray, which possibly has the advantage of producing less glare, but provides less contrast. Secondly, the serif font selected (whose name does not seem to be identified in the book — a common practice ages ago) has quite thin curves, which arguably does make the font face more stylish, but diminishes readability.

In terms of the target audience, the authors do not assume that the reader knows PHP (although some is shown in the chapter on theming), but they do assume that the reader is comfortable installing a PHP-based content management system and all of its required technologies, and familiar enough with Drupal to be able to navigate through the administrative area, download and add modules, and perform other basic admin tasks. Programmers just getting started with Drupal will benefit the most from this book, while experienced Drupal programmers will most likely learn some hitherto unknown best practices, and perhaps even some valuable modules or techniques that the individual has never seen before.

Using Drupal is a detailed and information-packed guide to the most promising contributed modules, and how they can be best employed for creating common types of Web sites. Drupal developers should find this a valuable part of their technical library, especially when they begin creating one of those types of Web sites for the first time.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer and freelance writer.

You can purchase Using Drupal from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "After installing and learning the basics of the content management system Drupal, many Web developers do not know how to best proceed from there. They may realize that much of the programming potential of Drupal — and thus the earning potential of Drupal developers — is derived from the use of community-contributed modules that greatly extend Drupal's power. But there are thousands of such modules, with no objective direction as to which ones are best suited for particular tasks, and what bugs and other flaws could trip up the developer. These programmers need a thorough guide as to which modules are the most promising for the development of the most common types of Web sites. A new book, Using Drupal, aims to fill this need." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Using Drupal author Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, James Walker, and Jeff Robbins pages 490 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0596515805 summary Key contributed Drupal modules put to use creating sample sites. Published by O'Reilly Media on 16 December 2008, under the ISBN 978-0596515805, the book is authored by Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, James Walker, and Jeff Robbins — all of whom are affiliated with Lullabot and are actively involved in the Drupal community and knowledgeable about Drupal's core and plug-in modules. Despite the old adage about having too many cooks in the kitchen, a technical book of this nature should benefit from having half a dozen authors, since each one will have his or her fortes, and the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts, as a result of this complementary expertise.

This title appears to be O'Reilly's first — and, as of this writing, only — Drupal book. This is in no way astonishing, given that O'Reilly has never been known for pushing books too quickly through development and production, simply to gain "first mover advantage." Rather, they generally work to create higher-quality efforts that will better stand the test of time — unlike the "shovel" books that some other publishers tend to push out the door, with less coherence and more errata. As a consequence, in the technical libraries of veteran programmers, one tends to see a disproportionately high number of book covers sporting pictures of animals.

On the publisher's Web page for Using Drupal, visitors can read the book's description, table of contents, colophon, errata (of which there are currently several), a link for purchasing the book in electronic form (in formats such as PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket), and a link for viewing the book immediately online, in the Safari Books Online system. There is a simple forum for the book, which currently contains seven posts, three of which already have replies from one of the book's authors and from an O'Reilly community manager. There is a browse system that allows the visitor to read portions of each section of each chapter, and thus preview the book before purchasing it. It even includes the illustrations within each previewed section, but for some reason does not include the figure numbers within the captions.

The authors have created their own site dedicated to the book, where visitors will find brief author biographies largely similar to those found at the very end of the book, with links to the authors' profile pages on Drupal.org. Lastly, there is a download page for the source code, which comprises a copy of Drupal 6, all of the contributed modules and themes needed to complete the hands-on exercises, and the supplementary resource files for those exercises, such as logos and product images. There is a change log for the download file, and yet no mention on the page — or even in the book itself, as far as I can tell — as to which version in the 6.x release series was used for the book and in the download package.

Oddly, neither the publisher's site nor the authors' site appears to mention the free downloadable chapter (Chapter 9, "Event Management"), although it is offered in an article posted in the blog section of Do It with Drupal.

After a foreword by Dries Buytaert — Drupal's founder and project lead — the book continues for 490 pages in total, organized into eleven chapters and three appendices. Nine of the chapters each begin with a description of a case study that will be used for illustrative purposes, followed by some implementation notes, which includes discussion of the candidate modules that could be used for this particular case study, and the trade-offs among them. The contributed modules that are chosen for the implementation and their capabilities are summarized, and then further explained with hands-on exercises — in which the particular modules are utilized and configured. Each of these nine chapters takes the reader through the development of a complete Web site, and is wrapped up with discussion of additional modules applicable to the kind of Web site being created. In Chapters 2 through 10, the case studies are: a simple Drupal site that supports client editing, a job posting board, a product reviews site, a wiki, a site for managing publishing workflow, a photo gallery, multilingual sites, an entertainment events management site, and an online store. Chapter 1 provides an overview of Drupal — covering modules, users, nodes, organizational schemes, and content types — preceded by a brief history of content management systems. Chapter 11 explores site theming, with details on the files and other elements that make up a theme, and how to customize them. The book's three appendices cover installing and upgrading Drupal, choosing the right modules for a job, and a list of the modules and themes used in the book.

The book's material is current with Drupal version 6, but should be of some value to any developer opting, for whatever reason, to stick with version 5. Speaking of versions, the authors should have mentioned which version of Drupal they chose, including the minor release number. The Drupal code in the aforesaid download package indicates that the chosen version is 6.4.

This book is unique, in that most if not all other Drupal books on the market are either introductory in nature — which at best devote only a single chapter to discussing third-party modules contributed by developers — or more advanced, specializing in a particular subject area, such as Drupal site security or e-commerce. Using Drupal, just as the title indicates, examines the detailed usage of best-of-breed modules to accomplish specific goals that one often encounters as a Web developer.

One of the most valuable aspects of software development books written by veteran programmers, is their discussions of various solutions to a particular problem — regardless of its size or complexity — and the reasons why they chose one approach instead of any of the others. Using Drupal is no exception. The authors examine the advantages and disadvantages of various third-party modules, even those that were not chosen for implementing the sample Web sites.

In any computer programming book, screenshots and other figures can be most helpful to the reader, because they reinforce the narrative descriptions of the cumulative results of all the steps up to that point. The screenshots are even valuable to someone following along on his own computer, because they provide immediate confirmation that he has not missed a critical step in the process. Using Drupal offers a generous amount of such screenshots, as well as information tables that help in visually breaking up the text. The only weakness with some of the screenshots is the lack of contrast between the text and the background, resulting in a dark gray shown on a light gray background — not always clearly readable.

The book is substantial in length and content, and naturally it cannot adequately cover dozens of sorts of Web sites. But clearly the book would have been more complete if it contained a chapter explaining how to allow content to be viewable by a limited set of authenticated users. An ideal case study for this would be the implementation of an e-zine site, for which prospective subscribers could view the homepage and other marketing material, but only subscribers could read the actual e-zine's contents. Even better would be to make this sample site fee-based, and show how to accept payments through PayPal (or some other payment systems for which there are Drupal modules) and possibly validate new subscribers automatically and instantly, using PayPal's IPN feature.

The flaws of this book are few and minor. There are unreported errata, most of them grammatical — e.g., "as [the] ability" (page 10) and "modules [that] were" (page 89) — which are to be expected in the first edition of any technical book. Speaking of errata, on the publisher's Web site, the errata should be sorted — or sortable — by page number, so it is much faster for people to see if a discovered erratum has already been reported. In addition, the URLs within the book that do not contain any filename (e.g., "http://www.example.com"; page 8) are in most if not all cases missing the trailing "/" (the root directory). Yet my primary complaint pertains to its production, and not its writing: For countless lines within the text, the spaces separating the words are too narrow, making it difficult to distinguish the words from one another when reading rapidly. As a consequence, each one of these lines almost appears to be a single word. (Skilled programmers know the great value of using whitespace in their code for enhancing readability; the same is certainly true for the printed word.) This readability problem is exacerbated by two factors: The ink color does not appear to be pure black, but instead a dark gray, which possibly has the advantage of producing less glare, but provides less contrast. Secondly, the serif font selected (whose name does not seem to be identified in the book — a common practice ages ago) has quite thin curves, which arguably does make the font face more stylish, but diminishes readability.

In terms of the target audience, the authors do not assume that the reader knows PHP (although some is shown in the chapter on theming), but they do assume that the reader is comfortable installing a PHP-based content management system and all of its required technologies, and familiar enough with Drupal to be able to navigate through the administrative area, download and add modules, and perform other basic admin tasks. Programmers just getting started with Drupal will benefit the most from this book, while experienced Drupal programmers will most likely learn some hitherto unknown best practices, and perhaps even some valuable modules or techniques that the individual has never seen before.

Using Drupal is a detailed and information-packed guide to the most promising contributed modules, and how they can be best employed for creating common types of Web sites. Drupal developers should find this a valuable part of their technical library, especially when they begin creating one of those types of Web sites for the first time.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer and freelance writer.

You can purchase Using Drupal from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "As perhaps the only substantial computer language embedded inside of the major Web browsers, JavaScript has brought an unprecedented level of power to client-side programming for the Internet. Yet as a result of cross-browser incompatibilities and other problems, it has probably also resulted in an unprecedented number of headaches for Web developers. JavaScript libraries attempt to mitigate much of these difficulties. One of the most popular such libraries, jQuery, is explored in a book by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz, titled jQuery in Action." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. jQuery in Action author Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz pages 376 publisher Manning Publications rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1933988351 summary A well-crafted guide to jQuery. Released by Manning Publications on 7 February 2008, under the ISBNs 1933988355 and 978-1933988351, jQuery in Action attempts to cover a large amount of information within its 376 pages. The material is grouped into nine chapters: an introduction to jQuery; wrapped element sets; modifying element properties, attributes, styling, and content; browser event models, including jQuery's; animations and effects; jQuery utility functions; plug-ins; AJAX; and four powerful plug-ins. The book concludes with an appendix, which may be the best place to start reading in the book, because it reviews many of the key aspects of JavaScript upon which more advanced jQuery heavily relies. The authors assume that the reader has a solid understanding of JavaScript, and is familiar with the basics of AJAX

As an introduction to jQuery, the first chapter briefly presents the rationale behind jQuery and its contribution to "Unobtrusive JavaScript," which is essentially the long overdue separation of JavaScript and CSS code from HTML markup — that is to say, separating behavior from structure in Web pages. With this new approach to JavaScript, the resultant code may in some cases be a bit longer, but it is far more readable, maintainable, and robust. Anyone who has tried to decipher cryptic JavaScript interwoven with HTML, will appreciate this leap forward. However, after these first two sections, prior to starting with the details of jQuery and its syntax, the authors should have explained to the reader where to find jQuery and how to reference it within a page. This critical information is provided only in the chapter summary, almost as an afterthought. A reader skipping the chapter summary could easily miss it.

The second and third chapters lay the groundwork for what will follow. The former chapter explains how to specify and manipulate sets of elements on the Web page, known as "wrapped element sets." This is done using all of the selection methods supported by CSS 3, as well as some additional selection capabilities built into jQuery. The latter chapter explains how to manage the properties and attributes of page elements, and how to get and set attribute values and other attribute manipulation techniques. The authors show how jQuery gives programmers tremendous control over the HTML and CSS of their Web pages, which can be changed by creating and modifying elements, and wrapping them in new elements, as well as adding and removing class names within the HTML, thereby using the existing CSS code. On the other side of the same coin, styling can also be updated by getting and setting the styles themselves, thereby using the existing HTML code. The last section of the third chapter focuses on form elements, which have special properties within both HTML and jQuery.

Event handling is a key aspect of any GUI, and is the subject of Chapter 4, in which the authors describe the DOM event models — focusing on Levels 0 and 2 — and how the jQuery event model helps to neutralize the problems introduced by Internet Explorer (naturally) failing to follow industry standards in its implementation of the DOM Level 2 Event Model. The chapter concludes with an extended examination of some sample code — in this case an order page from the online menu of an imaginary Asian fusion restaurant.

The book shifts gears in its fifth chapter, which explains how to use animation and other effects to jazz up the Web page — such as fading images in and out, as well as smoothly resizing and moving elements on the page. For instance, the first application of these capabilities is in the form of a collapsible list, which is ideal for making lengthy vertical navigation menus far less space consuming. Chapter 6 arms the reader with an understanding of jQuery's many utility functions, which can be used to trim unneeded spaces from strings, iterate through collections and properties, filter and translate arrays, extend objects, load scripts dynamically, and determine the site visitor's user agent and box model. These functions add the capabilities to one's jQuery code; yet one can even extend jQuery itself, by using plug-ins created by other developers or by oneself. In Chapter 7, the authors explain how anyone can write custom utility functions, which they illustrate with a date formatting function. They also explain how-to create custom wrapper methods.

Although it has its detractors, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) has enabled a plethora of new ways to make Web pages respond faster to user events, without requiring the overhead of wholesale page reloads. AJAX is the topic of Chapter 8, and the authors begin with a review of how to make asynchronous requests using the JavaScript XHR object, thus enabling the page to communicate with the server. This can be used for loading content into page elements, making GET and POST requests, and more. Similar to the previous two chapters, this one ends with a detailed examination of sample code. The final chapter in the book begins with a brief overview of jQuery plug-ins, and then examines in detail four highly popular plug-ins for handling HTML forms, controlling the dimensions of elements, declaring element behavior prior to creating the elements themselves, and gaining even greater control over the user interface, such as dragging and dropping elements on the page.

Anyone interested in learning more about the book can consult the publisher's page, which offers a book description, excerpts from reviews, and links to pages containing the supplemental sections of the book, such as the table of contents. It also has the book's errata, of which there are listed (as of this writing) five in the second printing, and three from the previous printing. Two sample chapters (2 and 5) are offered, as well as all of the sample source code. The PDF version of the book can be purchased online, at a discount to the printed version; the two can also be purchased as a bundle. Lastly, there is an authors' forum, where readers are invited to post questions, almost all of which have been kindly answered why the authors.

jQuery in Action illustrates how the primary aim of programming frameworks is to encapsulate much of the details of the language being used, so the developer can focus on the higher-level purpose of the code they are creating, and not the minutia of syntax and, in the case of JavaScript, differences among browsers. The authors successfully demonstrate the major concepts, primarily through the use of what they refer to as "lab pages" — essentially detailed code samples, with explanations, beginning with the second chapter. These exemplify the spirit of Manning's "in Action" series of technical books, which recognizes that in computer programming — as with probably most every other field — the best way to learn is by doing, and in this case, seeing sample code in action. This also makes it easier for the reader to modify the given code and experiment with it, to confirm what they have learned, and perhaps discover something new. Most of the sample code for this book runs fine in a Web browser opening the HTML files, without having to be run on a local Web server.

This book should prove a favorite among jQuery developers. The authors zero in on the core components of the library, and explain everything clearly — providing thorough coverage, without excessive verbiage. They are forthright about the weaknesses of jQuery, just as much as its strengths. The book does not contain a large number of screenshots or other figures, but it does use those in conjunction with code snippets, tables, and command syntax summaries to help break up the text visually. The authors improve the readability of the material with a genuine sense of humor, yet without resorting to the silliness currently found in many books written by programmers.

There are few blemishes, and of those, none are major. Phrasing in a few instances could be confusing to the average reader, such as referring to functions as elements just a few paragraphs after mentioning CSS elements (in the "NOTE" on page 9). The chapter summaries add no value, and should be jettisoned. Also, they should not be used as a place to introduce information not even mentioned in the corresponding chapters, e.g., the jQuery download information noted above. Almost every chapter summary touched upon something that had not proceeded it; such material should be folded into the particular chapter proper. The chapter titles should be in title case, and not sentence case. On the other hand, some phrases are incorrectly put in title case, such as "Rich Internet Applications" — a phrase overused. There were only a few errata not already reported on the publisher's Web page, such as "it incursion" (page 15). As with many computer books nowadays, there is an excessive use of exclamation marks. In terms of the sample code, it is complete and quite handy for trying out the ideas discussed in the book, and learning by modifying it. However, the JavaScript portions of the code can be difficult to read, because most of the code is compressed, with almost no use of whitespace to enhance readability.

With its capable technical coverage, extensive use of sample code, and approachable style, jQuery in Action is a valuable resource for any Web developer seeking to maximize the power of JavaScript, and a must-have for anyone interested in learning jQuery.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase jQuery in Action from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "As perhaps the only substantial computer language embedded inside of the major Web browsers, JavaScript has brought an unprecedented level of power to client-side programming for the Internet. Yet as a result of cross-browser incompatibilities and other problems, it has probably also resulted in an unprecedented number of headaches for Web developers. JavaScript libraries attempt to mitigate much of these difficulties. One of the most popular such libraries, jQuery, is explored in a book by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz, titled jQuery in Action." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. jQuery in Action author Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz pages 376 publisher Manning Publications rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1933988351 summary A well-crafted guide to jQuery. Released by Manning Publications on 7 February 2008, under the ISBNs 1933988355 and 978-1933988351, jQuery in Action attempts to cover a large amount of information within its 376 pages. The material is grouped into nine chapters: an introduction to jQuery; wrapped element sets; modifying element properties, attributes, styling, and content; browser event models, including jQuery's; animations and effects; jQuery utility functions; plug-ins; AJAX; and four powerful plug-ins. The book concludes with an appendix, which may be the best place to start reading in the book, because it reviews many of the key aspects of JavaScript upon which more advanced jQuery heavily relies. The authors assume that the reader has a solid understanding of JavaScript, and is familiar with the basics of AJAX

As an introduction to jQuery, the first chapter briefly presents the rationale behind jQuery and its contribution to "Unobtrusive JavaScript," which is essentially the long overdue separation of JavaScript and CSS code from HTML markup — that is to say, separating behavior from structure in Web pages. With this new approach to JavaScript, the resultant code may in some cases be a bit longer, but it is far more readable, maintainable, and robust. Anyone who has tried to decipher cryptic JavaScript interwoven with HTML, will appreciate this leap forward. However, after these first two sections, prior to starting with the details of jQuery and its syntax, the authors should have explained to the reader where to find jQuery and how to reference it within a page. This critical information is provided only in the chapter summary, almost as an afterthought. A reader skipping the chapter summary could easily miss it.

The second and third chapters lay the groundwork for what will follow. The former chapter explains how to specify and manipulate sets of elements on the Web page, known as "wrapped element sets." This is done using all of the selection methods supported by CSS 3, as well as some additional selection capabilities built into jQuery. The latter chapter explains how to manage the properties and attributes of page elements, and how to get and set attribute values and other attribute manipulation techniques. The authors show how jQuery gives programmers tremendous control over the HTML and CSS of their Web pages, which can be changed by creating and modifying elements, and wrapping them in new elements, as well as adding and removing class names within the HTML, thereby using the existing CSS code. On the other side of the same coin, styling can also be updated by getting and setting the styles themselves, thereby using the existing HTML code. The last section of the third chapter focuses on form elements, which have special properties within both HTML and jQuery.

Event handling is a key aspect of any GUI, and is the subject of Chapter 4, in which the authors describe the DOM event models — focusing on Levels 0 and 2 — and how the jQuery event model helps to neutralize the problems introduced by Internet Explorer (naturally) failing to follow industry standards in its implementation of the DOM Level 2 Event Model. The chapter concludes with an extended examination of some sample code — in this case an order page from the online menu of an imaginary Asian fusion restaurant.

The book shifts gears in its fifth chapter, which explains how to use animation and other effects to jazz up the Web page — such as fading images in and out, as well as smoothly resizing and moving elements on the page. For instance, the first application of these capabilities is in the form of a collapsible list, which is ideal for making lengthy vertical navigation menus far less space consuming. Chapter 6 arms the reader with an understanding of jQuery's many utility functions, which can be used to trim unneeded spaces from strings, iterate through collections and properties, filter and translate arrays, extend objects, load scripts dynamically, and determine the site visitor's user agent and box model. These functions add the capabilities to one's jQuery code; yet one can even extend jQuery itself, by using plug-ins created by other developers or by oneself. In Chapter 7, the authors explain how anyone can write custom utility functions, which they illustrate with a date formatting function. They also explain how-to create custom wrapper methods.

Although it has its detractors, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) has enabled a plethora of new ways to make Web pages respond faster to user events, without requiring the overhead of wholesale page reloads. AJAX is the topic of Chapter 8, and the authors begin with a review of how to make asynchronous requests using the JavaScript XHR object, thus enabling the page to communicate with the server. This can be used for loading content into page elements, making GET and POST requests, and more. Similar to the previous two chapters, this one ends with a detailed examination of sample code. The final chapter in the book begins with a brief overview of jQuery plug-ins, and then examines in detail four highly popular plug-ins for handling HTML forms, controlling the dimensions of elements, declaring element behavior prior to creating the elements themselves, and gaining even greater control over the user interface, such as dragging and dropping elements on the page.

Anyone interested in learning more about the book can consult the publisher's page, which offers a book description, excerpts from reviews, and links to pages containing the supplemental sections of the book, such as the table of contents. It also has the book's errata, of which there are listed (as of this writing) five in the second printing, and three from the previous printing. Two sample chapters (2 and 5) are offered, as well as all of the sample source code. The PDF version of the book can be purchased online, at a discount to the printed version; the two can also be purchased as a bundle. Lastly, there is an authors' forum, where readers are invited to post questions, almost all of which have been kindly answered why the authors.

jQuery in Action illustrates how the primary aim of programming frameworks is to encapsulate much of the details of the language being used, so the developer can focus on the higher-level purpose of the code they are creating, and not the minutia of syntax and, in the case of JavaScript, differences among browsers. The authors successfully demonstrate the major concepts, primarily through the use of what they refer to as "lab pages" — essentially detailed code samples, with explanations, beginning with the second chapter. These exemplify the spirit of Manning's "in Action" series of technical books, which recognizes that in computer programming — as with probably most every other field — the best way to learn is by doing, and in this case, seeing sample code in action. This also makes it easier for the reader to modify the given code and experiment with it, to confirm what they have learned, and perhaps discover something new. Most of the sample code for this book runs fine in a Web browser opening the HTML files, without having to be run on a local Web server.

This book should prove a favorite among jQuery developers. The authors zero in on the core components of the library, and explain everything clearly — providing thorough coverage, without excessive verbiage. They are forthright about the weaknesses of jQuery, just as much as its strengths. The book does not contain a large number of screenshots or other figures, but it does use those in conjunction with code snippets, tables, and command syntax summaries to help break up the text visually. The authors improve the readability of the material with a genuine sense of humor, yet without resorting to the silliness currently found in many books written by programmers.

There are few blemishes, and of those, none are major. Phrasing in a few instances could be confusing to the average reader, such as referring to functions as elements just a few paragraphs after mentioning CSS elements (in the "NOTE" on page 9). The chapter summaries add no value, and should be jettisoned. Also, they should not be used as a place to introduce information not even mentioned in the corresponding chapters, e.g., the jQuery download information noted above. Almost every chapter summary touched upon something that had not proceeded it; such material should be folded into the particular chapter proper. The chapter titles should be in title case, and not sentence case. On the other hand, some phrases are incorrectly put in title case, such as "Rich Internet Applications" — a phrase overused. There were only a few errata not already reported on the publisher's Web page, such as "it incursion" (page 15). As with many computer books nowadays, there is an excessive use of exclamation marks. In terms of the sample code, it is complete and quite handy for trying out the ideas discussed in the book, and learning by modifying it. However, the JavaScript portions of the code can be difficult to read, because most of the code is compressed, with almost no use of whitespace to enhance readability.

With its capable technical coverage, extensive use of sample code, and approachable style, jQuery in Action is a valuable resource for any Web developer seeking to maximize the power of JavaScript, and a must-have for anyone interested in learning jQuery.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase jQuery in Action from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "As Internet users' expectations continue to ratchet upwards, it is increasingly essential that every Web site owner maximize the chances that those users will find the site in question, and, once found, that the site will perform well enough that those visitors become customers or members, and recommend the site to others. Key elements of a successful strategy include optimization for search engines, pay-per-click advertising, and visitor conversion, as well as responsive Web pages and fine-tuning of all the above, using various metrics. These topics and others are explored in Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets by Andrew B. King." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Website Optimization author Andrew B. King pages 394 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 0596515081 summary Techniques for increasing a site's SEO, conversion rates, and speed. The book was published by O'Reilly Media on 15 July 2008, under the ISBNs 0596515081 and 978-0596515089. Website Optimization is organized into two major parts: search engine marketing optimization and Web performance optimization. The book's material, spanning 394 pages, is divided into 10 chapters, covering a range of topics: natural search engine optimization, an SEO case study, pay-per-click optimization, a case study thereof, conversion rate optimization, Web page performance, CSS optimization, AJAX optimization, server- and client-side performance techniques, and Web site metrics. The book begins with a forward by Jim Sterne, a Web marketing and metrics consultant, followed by a preface in which Andy King provides an overview of what is to follow, as well as credits to four other individuals. These credits are confusing, because they do not make clear for what exactly the individuals are being credited! The reader will be left wondering: Are these people the technical editing team? Or did they write some of the material in the book, without byline? Or did they only provide research material to the primary author? In personal correspondence to me, Andy King mentions that this book was "written by a team of experts let [sic] by me." Thus, they are apparently co-authors, but not identified as so in the book.

The first five chapters of the book focus on optimization of search engine marketing (SEM), which comprises search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and conversion rate optimization (CRO). The author(s) begin by demonstrating, through cited statistics, just how critical it is for Web sites to appear within the first few search engine result pages (SERPs), otherwise the sites will probably not be found by the roughly 90 percent of Internet users who do not bother looking at any subsequent pages. This documented selectivity should alone serve as an energizing wake-up call to any Web site owners who — either through ignorance or laziness — make no effort to improve their rankings within the major search engine results. The first chapter delineates the most common SEO mistakes, as well as basic techniques for achieving higher rankings. The two categories could have been combined, simply by inverting the language of the first category; for instance, "develop an adequate number of popular inbound links" could replace "[avoid] a lack of popular inbound links." The bulk of the SEO information will be familiar to most Web marketing veterans, though even they should glean some new pointers. All of the advice is correct, up-to-date, and worthy of implementation on any site — existing or under development. However, the "Step 3" and "Step 4" in Figures 1-6 and 1-7 may be confused by some readers with the identical section headings in the book's text. Note also that the KEI of "84,100" should instead read "84.100" (page 17). Lastly, the first and third sample URIs are missing GET keys (page 29).

The strategies for natural search engine optimization, presented in the first chapter, are illustrated in the second — through a case study of the SEO overhaul of a Philadelphia dental practice's Web site. The original version of the site was lacking keyword-rich headers, body copy, inbound links, etc. (In addition, the dentist's e-mail address was revealed to spam harvesters in plain text. Andy King mentions the use of a contact form to resolve this problem, but does not mention that there are methods of displaying an e-mail address to human visitors, while hiding it from spambots.) This site's search engine results were dramatically boosted through two iterations of SEO fine-tuning, redesign, and release. While this particular dentist's site was greatly improved by the work described in this chapter, the book itself is not improved by inclusion of said chapter, since no additional SEO techniques are offered to the reader, and the first chapter already had enough HTML code snippets to exemplify the concepts discussed. In fact, the case study results should have been boiled down to a few paragraphs and better presented as a sidebar at the end of the first chapter, or moved to the back as an appendix. This latter approach is further supported by the fact that the second chapter illustrates best practices discussed in chapters that the reader has presumably yet to read (5 and 6). The material that composes the actual last sidebar in the first chapter — on metadata and microformats — could have been relegated to an appendix.

Search engine-based ad campaigns are the most important elements in the marketing strategies of countless online vendors, and in Chapter 3, Andy King explains how to increase a site's pay-per-click results, click-through rates (CTRs), and conversion rates. He begins by explaining some key terms and concepts, which should be quite helpful for most readers — especially given how much the online marketing world is laden with terminology and acronyms. The chapter reviews the advertising programs of the three top search engines, and discusses PPC optimization for those programs, with special emphasis given to Google AdWords. Like the first chapter of the book, this one does a competent job of explaining and illustrating the key ideas, and making clear topics that can be quite daunting to anyone new to the field. However, additional clarification of some terms would be helpful, otherwise many readers may be uncertain as to what is meant by terms such as "negative keywords," which unfortunately are left undefined. Even phrases outside the online marketing industry, such as "second-price sealed bidding system," could confuse countless readers. More importantly, some of the material is discussed at a level higher than what would be really usable for most site owners and developers — in contrast to the first chapter, which generally presented more actionable details. In fact, for readers unfamiliar with all the factors involved in running a PPC ad campaign, the early portion of this chapter could prove quite bewildering. Returning to the issue of how best to present case studies, the "Bid Optimization in Action: The E-Grooming Book Example" section shows how illustrative examples can be presented much more concisely. In contrast, Chapter 4, which consumes eight pages, shows how not to illustrate concepts already discussed.

Considerable SEO and PPC efforts could pay off in the form of a huge increase in traffic to one's Web site. But all of that would be in vain if there were no corresponding increase in turning those visitors into customers. Chapter 6 is devoted to conversion rate optimization, and presents some key elements of persuading online prospects, as well as the top 10 factors for maximizing one's conversion rates, from an online marketing and sales perspective. This chapter is rich in material that should inspire site owners to critically reevaluate their sites' contents, as well as their competitors'.

The sixth chapter, on Web page optimization, commences the second part of the book, and explores the most common pitfalls that lead to poor site performance, as well as ten techniques for increasing page display speeds — many of them based upon Steve Souders's book High Performance Web Sites. Andrew King correctly notes that this optimization can result in increased profits, customer satisfaction, and accessibility. However, he also claims that it will decrease costs as well as improve site maintainability and search engine rankings. He should have made it clear that faster page loading per se will not provide those last three benefits, but rather those are potential secondary gains that result from changes to code and other factors with the goal of decreasing page load times for site visitors. Nonetheless, even the most experienced Web developers should find one or more ideas in this chapter for reducing the total bandwidth consumption of the pages they create — particularly for anyone serving video content, which receives substantial coverage in this chapter. Chapter 7, on CSS optimization, follows a pattern similar to its predecessor, by presenting ten methods for improving one's CSS code, as helpful rules. The advice is spot-on, and well illustrated with examples. The suggested methods are preceded by brief discussion of reset rules, including mention of the (differing) reset rules advocated by Eric Meyer and Yahoo. It would be interesting to have learned the author's perspective on the technical differences, and why the author chose one set of rules over another. Incidentally, the paragraph describing the section, immediately below the "Tip #1" header, should have been located above it. Also, on page 195, " | inherit" should have been explained, or, better yet, excised. Lastly, the "|" appears to be missing from the similar instances on the three subsequent pages.

During the past several years, there has been a huge increase in the usage of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) to reduce dynamic Web page reloading, and to make Web sites behave more like desktop applications. Unfortunately, there are pitfalls in this approach, and Andy King discusses them in Chapter 8, in addition to numerous best practices for minimizing these problems within one's own AJAX code. Incidentally, in the tip on page 225, the author states that the sample AJAX application will not run on your desktop; this apparently means that it cannot run on a local Web server. An explanation as to why, would most likely be of interest to the typical reader. Prior to getting into the details of JavaScript optimization, some tips on evaluating and choosing an AJAX library are presented.

Chapter 9 covers additional optimization techniques — aside from the Web page and code techniques covered earlier — on both the server and client side. The former category consists of parallel downloads, frequent caching, HTTP compression, delta encoding, and rewriting URIs. The latter category consists of load delaying, caching of off-site files on the server to be loaded locally, JavaScript packing, and inlining images.

The last chapter delves into Web site metrics for measuring the effectiveness of Web sites and changes made to them. The author explains some of the most popular and telling metrics, the leading Web analytics software (both Web server log analysis and JavaScript page tagging), and how they can be used for improving one's search marketing strategies and results. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of Web performance metrics — i.e., measures of page load times, oftentimes broken out by site, request sizes, and content type. The material clearly shows that there are a great many options for testing the optimization techniques presented in all of the earlier chapters.

There are two Web sites that have additional information about the book: O'Reilly's book page offers book descriptions, the table of contents, and confirmed and reported errata (of which there are no significant ones, as of this writing). There is a more substantial author book site, which has chapter summaries, full color figures, worksheets, all the sample code, and links to external reviews.

In general, the book achieves its goals. Aside from the occasional marketing term that will most likely puzzle the majority of readers (more on that in a moment), the writing is clear and the examples cited are applicable. The illustrations created and chosen for this book are more than adequate in quality and number, although some of the graph labels would be confusing if not clarified by the text, e.g., "Mean Fixation Duration" (page 2). Web site statistics and other data are well referenced throughout the manuscript.

On the other hand, the brief chapter summaries add nothing new to the reader's understanding, and could be disposed of without loss to the book's usefulness. Chapter summaries are more appropriate for books whose material is far more lengthy and dense, thus justifying summaries as a way to convey the highlights to the reader. As noted earlier, the case study chapters similarly add very little value, if any, to Website Optimization, and could in future editions be folded into the relevant chapters, as sidebars, or at least made much more concise and moved to the back as appendices. There is a fair bit of repetition, in the form of allusions to techniques that are covered in more detail in earlier or later chapters, and other times in the form of redundancy within chapters. For instance, the sidebar on page 156, concerning CSS and JavaScript placement, consists of a uselessly brief mention of information covered later in more detail. Trimming away all of the repeated material and the chapter summaries, and folding the case studies into the relevant chapters, would make the book leaner and a faster read. Furthermore, some of the phrases are not entirely clear in their meaning, at least to readers who are not SEO marketers. For instance, "flagged sites" (page 12) — flagged for what? Some of the phrasing is confusing, if not downright bizarre, e.g. "information scent" (page 2) and "the scent of a link" (page 122)

Admittedly, a Web site owner could learn much of this information by reading numerous articles freely available online. But most businesspeople value their time much more highly than that, and would probably find a significant amount of repetition among those articles, because they tend to "borrow" a lot from one another. This is especially true in the cases of writers who have never done SEO optimization to a Web site themselves, or run a PPC campaign.

Aside from the aforesaid weaknesses, Website Optimization is an engaging, comprehensive, and valuable resource for anyone who wishes to improve the online marketing results of their own businesses Web sites or those of the clients they support. Online business owners and Web developers unfamiliar with core SEO and site optimization techniques, are urged to read this book.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase Website Optimization from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "As Internet users' expectations continue to ratchet upwards, it is increasingly essential that every Web site owner maximize the chances that those users will find the site in question, and, once found, that the site will perform well enough that those visitors become customers or members, and recommend the site to others. Key elements of a successful strategy include optimization for search engines, pay-per-click advertising, and visitor conversion, as well as responsive Web pages and fine-tuning of all the above, using various metrics. These topics and others are explored in Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets by Andrew B. King." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Website Optimization author Andrew B. King pages 394 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 0596515081 summary Techniques for increasing a site's SEO, conversion rates, and speed. The book was published by O'Reilly Media on 15 July 2008, under the ISBNs 0596515081 and 978-0596515089. Website Optimization is organized into two major parts: search engine marketing optimization and Web performance optimization. The book's material, spanning 394 pages, is divided into 10 chapters, covering a range of topics: natural search engine optimization, an SEO case study, pay-per-click optimization, a case study thereof, conversion rate optimization, Web page performance, CSS optimization, AJAX optimization, server- and client-side performance techniques, and Web site metrics. The book begins with a forward by Jim Sterne, a Web marketing and metrics consultant, followed by a preface in which Andy King provides an overview of what is to follow, as well as credits to four other individuals. These credits are confusing, because they do not make clear for what exactly the individuals are being credited! The reader will be left wondering: Are these people the technical editing team? Or did they write some of the material in the book, without byline? Or did they only provide research material to the primary author? In personal correspondence to me, Andy King mentions that this book was "written by a team of experts let [sic] by me." Thus, they are apparently co-authors, but not identified as so in the book.

The first five chapters of the book focus on optimization of search engine marketing (SEM), which comprises search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and conversion rate optimization (CRO). The author(s) begin by demonstrating, through cited statistics, just how critical it is for Web sites to appear within the first few search engine result pages (SERPs), otherwise the sites will probably not be found by the roughly 90 percent of Internet users who do not bother looking at any subsequent pages. This documented selectivity should alone serve as an energizing wake-up call to any Web site owners who — either through ignorance or laziness — make no effort to improve their rankings within the major search engine results. The first chapter delineates the most common SEO mistakes, as well as basic techniques for achieving higher rankings. The two categories could have been combined, simply by inverting the language of the first category; for instance, "develop an adequate number of popular inbound links" could replace "[avoid] a lack of popular inbound links." The bulk of the SEO information will be familiar to most Web marketing veterans, though even they should glean some new pointers. All of the advice is correct, up-to-date, and worthy of implementation on any site — existing or under development. However, the "Step 3" and "Step 4" in Figures 1-6 and 1-7 may be confused by some readers with the identical section headings in the book's text. Note also that the KEI of "84,100" should instead read "84.100" (page 17). Lastly, the first and third sample URIs are missing GET keys (page 29).

The strategies for natural search engine optimization, presented in the first chapter, are illustrated in the second — through a case study of the SEO overhaul of a Philadelphia dental practice's Web site. The original version of the site was lacking keyword-rich headers, body copy, inbound links, etc. (In addition, the dentist's e-mail address was revealed to spam harvesters in plain text. Andy King mentions the use of a contact form to resolve this problem, but does not mention that there are methods of displaying an e-mail address to human visitors, while hiding it from spambots.) This site's search engine results were dramatically boosted through two iterations of SEO fine-tuning, redesign, and release. While this particular dentist's site was greatly improved by the work described in this chapter, the book itself is not improved by inclusion of said chapter, since no additional SEO techniques are offered to the reader, and the first chapter already had enough HTML code snippets to exemplify the concepts discussed. In fact, the case study results should have been boiled down to a few paragraphs and better presented as a sidebar at the end of the first chapter, or moved to the back as an appendix. This latter approach is further supported by the fact that the second chapter illustrates best practices discussed in chapters that the reader has presumably yet to read (5 and 6). The material that composes the actual last sidebar in the first chapter — on metadata and microformats — could have been relegated to an appendix.

Search engine-based ad campaigns are the most important elements in the marketing strategies of countless online vendors, and in Chapter 3, Andy King explains how to increase a site's pay-per-click results, click-through rates (CTRs), and conversion rates. He begins by explaining some key terms and concepts, which should be quite helpful for most readers — especially given how much the online marketing world is laden with terminology and acronyms. The chapter reviews the advertising programs of the three top search engines, and discusses PPC optimization for those programs, with special emphasis given to Google AdWords. Like the first chapter of the book, this one does a competent job of explaining and illustrating the key ideas, and making clear topics that can be quite daunting to anyone new to the field. However, additional clarification of some terms would be helpful, otherwise many readers may be uncertain as to what is meant by terms such as "negative keywords," which unfortunately are left undefined. Even phrases outside the online marketing industry, such as "second-price sealed bidding system," could confuse countless readers. More importantly, some of the material is discussed at a level higher than what would be really usable for most site owners and developers — in contrast to the first chapter, which generally presented more actionable details. In fact, for readers unfamiliar with all the factors involved in running a PPC ad campaign, the early portion of this chapter could prove quite bewildering. Returning to the issue of how best to present case studies, the "Bid Optimization in Action: The E-Grooming Book Example" section shows how illustrative examples can be presented much more concisely. In contrast, Chapter 4, which consumes eight pages, shows how not to illustrate concepts already discussed.

Considerable SEO and PPC efforts could pay off in the form of a huge increase in traffic to one's Web site. But all of that would be in vain if there were no corresponding increase in turning those visitors into customers. Chapter 6 is devoted to conversion rate optimization, and presents some key elements of persuading online prospects, as well as the top 10 factors for maximizing one's conversion rates, from an online marketing and sales perspective. This chapter is rich in material that should inspire site owners to critically reevaluate their sites' contents, as well as their competitors'.

The sixth chapter, on Web page optimization, commences the second part of the book, and explores the most common pitfalls that lead to poor site performance, as well as ten techniques for increasing page display speeds — many of them based upon Steve Souders's book High Performance Web Sites. Andrew King correctly notes that this optimization can result in increased profits, customer satisfaction, and accessibility. However, he also claims that it will decrease costs as well as improve site maintainability and search engine rankings. He should have made it clear that faster page loading per se will not provide those last three benefits, but rather those are potential secondary gains that result from changes to code and other factors with the goal of decreasing page load times for site visitors. Nonetheless, even the most experienced Web developers should find one or more ideas in this chapter for reducing the total bandwidth consumption of the pages they create — particularly for anyone serving video content, which receives substantial coverage in this chapter. Chapter 7, on CSS optimization, follows a pattern similar to its predecessor, by presenting ten methods for improving one's CSS code, as helpful rules. The advice is spot-on, and well illustrated with examples. The suggested methods are preceded by brief discussion of reset rules, including mention of the (differing) reset rules advocated by Eric Meyer and Yahoo. It would be interesting to have learned the author's perspective on the technical differences, and why the author chose one set of rules over another. Incidentally, the paragraph describing the section, immediately below the "Tip #1" header, should have been located above it. Also, on page 195, " | inherit" should have been explained, or, better yet, excised. Lastly, the "|" appears to be missing from the similar instances on the three subsequent pages.

During the past several years, there has been a huge increase in the usage of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) to reduce dynamic Web page reloading, and to make Web sites behave more like desktop applications. Unfortunately, there are pitfalls in this approach, and Andy King discusses them in Chapter 8, in addition to numerous best practices for minimizing these problems within one's own AJAX code. Incidentally, in the tip on page 225, the author states that the sample AJAX application will not run on your desktop; this apparently means that it cannot run on a local Web server. An explanation as to why, would most likely be of interest to the typical reader. Prior to getting into the details of JavaScript optimization, some tips on evaluating and choosing an AJAX library are presented.

Chapter 9 covers additional optimization techniques — aside from the Web page and code techniques covered earlier — on both the server and client side. The former category consists of parallel downloads, frequent caching, HTTP compression, delta encoding, and rewriting URIs. The latter category consists of load delaying, caching of off-site files on the server to be loaded locally, JavaScript packing, and inlining images.

The last chapter delves into Web site metrics for measuring the effectiveness of Web sites and changes made to them. The author explains some of the most popular and telling metrics, the leading Web analytics software (both Web server log analysis and JavaScript page tagging), and how they can be used for improving one's search marketing strategies and results. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of Web performance metrics — i.e., measures of page load times, oftentimes broken out by site, request sizes, and content type. The material clearly shows that there are a great many options for testing the optimization techniques presented in all of the earlier chapters.

There are two Web sites that have additional information about the book: O'Reilly's book page offers book descriptions, the table of contents, and confirmed and reported errata (of which there are no significant ones, as of this writing). There is a more substantial author book site, which has chapter summaries, full color figures, worksheets, all the sample code, and links to external reviews.

In general, the book achieves its goals. Aside from the occasional marketing term that will most likely puzzle the majority of readers (more on that in a moment), the writing is clear and the examples cited are applicable. The illustrations created and chosen for this book are more than adequate in quality and number, although some of the graph labels would be confusing if not clarified by the text, e.g., "Mean Fixation Duration" (page 2). Web site statistics and other data are well referenced throughout the manuscript.

On the other hand, the brief chapter summaries add nothing new to the reader's understanding, and could be disposed of without loss to the book's usefulness. Chapter summaries are more appropriate for books whose material is far more lengthy and dense, thus justifying summaries as a way to convey the highlights to the reader. As noted earlier, the case study chapters similarly add very little value, if any, to Website Optimization, and could in future editions be folded into the relevant chapters, as sidebars, or at least made much more concise and moved to the back as appendices. There is a fair bit of repetition, in the form of allusions to techniques that are covered in more detail in earlier or later chapters, and other times in the form of redundancy within chapters. For instance, the sidebar on page 156, concerning CSS and JavaScript placement, consists of a uselessly brief mention of information covered later in more detail. Trimming away all of the repeated material and the chapter summaries, and folding the case studies into the relevant chapters, would make the book leaner and a faster read. Furthermore, some of the phrases are not entirely clear in their meaning, at least to readers who are not SEO marketers. For instance, "flagged sites" (page 12) — flagged for what? Some of the phrasing is confusing, if not downright bizarre, e.g. "information scent" (page 2) and "the scent of a link" (page 122)

Admittedly, a Web site owner could learn much of this information by reading numerous articles freely available online. But most businesspeople value their time much more highly than that, and would probably find a significant amount of repetition among those articles, because they tend to "borrow" a lot from one another. This is especially true in the cases of writers who have never done SEO optimization to a Web site themselves, or run a PPC campaign.

Aside from the aforesaid weaknesses, Website Optimization is an engaging, comprehensive, and valuable resource for anyone who wishes to improve the online marketing results of their own businesses Web sites or those of the clients they support. Online business owners and Web developers unfamiliar with core SEO and site optimization techniques, are urged to read this book.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase Website Optimization from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Most Web developers are familiar with one or more content management systems (CMSs), and how they can be used to create Web sites more efficiently than by hand. These developers may have deep knowledge of how to install, configure, customize, and extend a CMS. But far more rare is knowledge of how to develop a CMS of one's own, and the programming considerations required to do so successfully. These are the main themes of Martin Brampton's book PHP5 CMS Framework Development." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. PHP5 CMS Framework Development author Martin Brampton pages 348 publisher Packt Publishing rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 1847193579 summary An in-depth look at creating a CMS, focusing on Aliro. This title was released by Packt Publishing on 6 June 2008, under the ISBNs 1847193579 and 978-1847193575. In addition to an appendix on packaging Aliro extensions, the book's material is organized into 14 chapters, covering various CMS topics: overall CMS architecture; users and administrators; code organization; user sessions; databases and data objects; access control; supporting extensions of the CMS; data caching and handlers; menus; support for multiple human languages; presentation services; miscellaneous services, such as file handling, e-mail delivery, and admin functionality; error handling; and how to manage many types of content.

At the very beginning of the preface, the author notes that "This book guides you through the design and implementation decisions necessary to create a working architecture for a PHP5-based content management system." Martin Brampton is qualified for this task, given his strong background in CMS development, having served as the leader of the Mambo development team during a critical period of its evolution, and later creating his own CMS, Aliro. It should be noted that the book does not assume any prior knowledge of CMSs in general or Aliro in particular, although in most respects this work is very much a case study of the architecture and design decisions of that specific CMS. However, the book does assume a solid understanding of PHP and object-oriented principles.

All of the code samples come from the Aliro content management system, of which Martin Brampton is the project architect. On the book's Web page, the publisher has made available links to purchase the electronic version of the book, to download the source code, to post feedback on the book, to ask questions, to read the table of contents and media reviews, and to download a sample chapter (Chapter 6: Access Control). The only problem with these offerings is that the source code is not organized by chapter, but instead comprises the source code for Aliro. (The publisher's page labels it as 2.6 MB, as of this writing, but Aliro is about three times that size.) Consequently, readers who want to find specific code should search through the files using their favorite programmer's editor.

The author devotes the first chapter of the book to presenting his perspective on the advantages of using CMSs for site development, the required and the desirable features of a CMS, and some system management issues. Also covered are reasons for using PHP 5, its object-oriented capabilities, XHTML, and the Model-View-Controller pattern. He then discusses sundry topics on site hosting, JavaScript, site security, and CMS-specific terminology. Many readers may find interesting the arguments for separating system administrative access (as done in Aliro, for instance) versus integrating it with the regular site interface and using access control to restrict non-admin users (as done in Drupal, for instance). The chapter concludes with a summary, which for this and the following two chapters, may be of value to some readers, since these chapters are more narrative than the others. But the chapter summaries that follow, for the more technical material, could be disposed of in future editions, since readers will seek within the chapters for the information covered.

Throughout much of the history of the Web, one of the most problematic aspects of site development has been the management of users and administrators — especially with CMSs causing the two distinct groups to be splintered into a spectrum ranging from anonymous visitors with no privileges, to site administrators with full privileges, along with authorized users, content contributors, and content editors. In his second chapter, the author examines the challenges of user authentication, password storage, SQL injection, and other access issues. He proposes a framework solution and also a division of user data into two tables, as done in Aliro. He describes some of the key code utilized within his CMS (naturally, the full code is obtainable since Aliro is an open-source project). Chapter 4 addresses an area that frequently mystifies new PHP programmers — namely, how to create, utilize, and protect user sessions. Thus, this material should have been placed immediately after the second chapter.

The third chapter is devoted to the critical architectural issue of how to best organize one's code. Given that the two aforementioned chapters — dealing with users and sessions — both contain a fair amount of code, this chapter's meta-information should have been presented prior to both Chapters 2 and 4. Nonetheless, the author covers such topics as inclusion and the singleton pattern. He makes a strong case for favoring small classes, stored in separate source code files, and only loading them when needed, using PHP 5's autoloading capability.

In Chapter 5, the author spends some time exploring some of the key issues for storing data in a CMS framework, including dependency upon a particular RDBMS, item counting and ordering, database security, SQL validation, PHP exception handling, and the techniques that the author used for effectively dealing with these challenges when developing his own CMS. The first portion of the chapter, which essentially presents the problems, is fairly disjointed compared to the other material; the remaining portion of the chapter, which covers all of the solutions, is certainly more complete.

The next two chapters of the book, 6 and 7, are focused on topics more specific to CMSs: access control, and extensions to the CMS (components, modules, plug-ins, and templates), respectively. Chapter 8 explores caching and cache handlers, as well as the advantages of using them. The ninth chapter, on menus and page handling, is quite specific to Aliro, and thus will prove disappointing to any reader who hopes to get ideas for their own menu code. In contrast, Chapter 10 should be of interest to anyone who would like their Web sites to be usable and appealing to Internet visitors who do not read the single language of any site not designed for foreign use. Character sets and language extensions are discussed, as well as a third-party solution that is available.

For many years there has been an ongoing debate among PHP developers, as to whether or not to use templating systems as a way of separating presentational content from business logic and functional content. At essence is a question pondered by most if not all dedicated PHP developers: What is the easiest and yet most maintainable way to deliver one's XHTML code, using PHP? This is just one of many subjects discussed in Chapter 11, "Presentation Services," which is easily one of the most compelling and wide ranging sections of the book. Chapter 12 addresses the topic of allowing a site to interact with other services, such as those for WYSIWYG editing and XML parsing. Error handling is explored in Chapter 13, including errors within application code — from PHP itself and from business logic problems — and the database. The book's final chapter covers what the author refers to as "real content," by which he means the content contributed by administrators and users to a CMS, such as articles, comments, forum postings, calendar entries, and other items. The book's single appendix explains how to package an Aliro extension for release, and would most likely be of no interest to anyone not creating such extensions for distribution.

The book has few weaknesses. Occasionally the author will state something that could be misleading to the beginning programmer. For instance, on the first page of the first chapter (not an auspicious start) he refers to the World Wide Web as a markup language. On the contrary, the markup language used to create the Web, is HTML. As we are seeing more frequently in technical books, the writing itself could use a bit more editing — such as hyphens missing from adjective phrases in many locations in the text. Lastly, some programmers may find the author's GNU style of code formatting rather bizarre in appearance.

Overall, PHP programmers who are committed to following best practices in site security, code organization, database usage, and other important factors in any site development, will find plenty of ideas in this book to consider and possibly apply to their own coding. Readers who simply see the book's title, and perhaps browse quickly through its contents, may get the false impression that the information would only be of value to someone who wants to create their own CMS from scratch. The book may be of considerable value for such an effort, but it offers more than that. Many of the most critical issues in architecting and implementing a CMS, apply to non-CMS Web sites as well. Also, as a veteran of software development, the author conveys worthy advice on development practices — such as in the first chapter — regardless of the chosen computer language. In addition, for the growing number of developers who are exploring the inner workings of CMSs — usually with the idea of extending their functionality by writing modules — an appreciation for how the creator of a CMS thinks, could be helpful. Ideas are illustrated throughout with sample code — none of them excessive in length. PHP5 CMS Framework Development offers lessons in PHP 5 object-oriented programming and Web site development that goes beyond CMSs and Aliro.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase PHP5 CMS Framework Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Most Web developers are familiar with one or more content management systems (CMSs), and how they can be used to create Web sites more efficiently than by hand. These developers may have deep knowledge of how to install, configure, customize, and extend a CMS. But far more rare is knowledge of how to develop a CMS of one's own, and the programming considerations required to do so successfully. These are the main themes of Martin Brampton's book PHP5 CMS Framework Development." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. PHP5 CMS Framework Development author Martin Brampton pages 348 publisher Packt Publishing rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 1847193579 summary An in-depth look at creating a CMS, focusing on Aliro. This title was released by Packt Publishing on 6 June 2008, under the ISBNs 1847193579 and 978-1847193575. In addition to an appendix on packaging Aliro extensions, the book's material is organized into 14 chapters, covering various CMS topics: overall CMS architecture; users and administrators; code organization; user sessions; databases and data objects; access control; supporting extensions of the CMS; data caching and handlers; menus; support for multiple human languages; presentation services; miscellaneous services, such as file handling, e-mail delivery, and admin functionality; error handling; and how to manage many types of content.

At the very beginning of the preface, the author notes that "This book guides you through the design and implementation decisions necessary to create a working architecture for a PHP5-based content management system." Martin Brampton is qualified for this task, given his strong background in CMS development, having served as the leader of the Mambo development team during a critical period of its evolution, and later creating his own CMS, Aliro. It should be noted that the book does not assume any prior knowledge of CMSs in general or Aliro in particular, although in most respects this work is very much a case study of the architecture and design decisions of that specific CMS. However, the book does assume a solid understanding of PHP and object-oriented principles.

All of the code samples come from the Aliro content management system, of which Martin Brampton is the project architect. On the book's Web page, the publisher has made available links to purchase the electronic version of the book, to download the source code, to post feedback on the book, to ask questions, to read the table of contents and media reviews, and to download a sample chapter (Chapter 6: Access Control). The only problem with these offerings is that the source code is not organized by chapter, but instead comprises the source code for Aliro. (The publisher's page labels it as 2.6 MB, as of this writing, but Aliro is about three times that size.) Consequently, readers who want to find specific code should search through the files using their favorite programmer's editor.

The author devotes the first chapter of the book to presenting his perspective on the advantages of using CMSs for site development, the required and the desirable features of a CMS, and some system management issues. Also covered are reasons for using PHP 5, its object-oriented capabilities, XHTML, and the Model-View-Controller pattern. He then discusses sundry topics on site hosting, JavaScript, site security, and CMS-specific terminology. Many readers may find interesting the arguments for separating system administrative access (as done in Aliro, for instance) versus integrating it with the regular site interface and using access control to restrict non-admin users (as done in Drupal, for instance). The chapter concludes with a summary, which for this and the following two chapters, may be of value to some readers, since these chapters are more narrative than the others. But the chapter summaries that follow, for the more technical material, could be disposed of in future editions, since readers will seek within the chapters for the information covered.

Throughout much of the history of the Web, one of the most problematic aspects of site development has been the management of users and administrators — especially with CMSs causing the two distinct groups to be splintered into a spectrum ranging from anonymous visitors with no privileges, to site administrators with full privileges, along with authorized users, content contributors, and content editors. In his second chapter, the author examines the challenges of user authentication, password storage, SQL injection, and other access issues. He proposes a framework solution and also a division of user data into two tables, as done in Aliro. He describes some of the key code utilized within his CMS (naturally, the full code is obtainable since Aliro is an open-source project). Chapter 4 addresses an area that frequently mystifies new PHP programmers — namely, how to create, utilize, and protect user sessions. Thus, this material should have been placed immediately after the second chapter.

The third chapter is devoted to the critical architectural issue of how to best organize one's code. Given that the two aforementioned chapters — dealing with users and sessions — both contain a fair amount of code, this chapter's meta-information should have been presented prior to both Chapters 2 and 4. Nonetheless, the author covers such topics as inclusion and the singleton pattern. He makes a strong case for favoring small classes, stored in separate source code files, and only loading them when needed, using PHP 5's autoloading capability.

In Chapter 5, the author spends some time exploring some of the key issues for storing data in a CMS framework, including dependency upon a particular RDBMS, item counting and ordering, database security, SQL validation, PHP exception handling, and the techniques that the author used for effectively dealing with these challenges when developing his own CMS. The first portion of the chapter, which essentially presents the problems, is fairly disjointed compared to the other material; the remaining portion of the chapter, which covers all of the solutions, is certainly more complete.

The next two chapters of the book, 6 and 7, are focused on topics more specific to CMSs: access control, and extensions to the CMS (components, modules, plug-ins, and templates), respectively. Chapter 8 explores caching and cache handlers, as well as the advantages of using them. The ninth chapter, on menus and page handling, is quite specific to Aliro, and thus will prove disappointing to any reader who hopes to get ideas for their own menu code. In contrast, Chapter 10 should be of interest to anyone who would like their Web sites to be usable and appealing to Internet visitors who do not read the single language of any site not designed for foreign use. Character sets and language extensions are discussed, as well as a third-party solution that is available.

For many years there has been an ongoing debate among PHP developers, as to whether or not to use templating systems as a way of separating presentational content from business logic and functional content. At essence is a question pondered by most if not all dedicated PHP developers: What is the easiest and yet most maintainable way to deliver one's XHTML code, using PHP? This is just one of many subjects discussed in Chapter 11, "Presentation Services," which is easily one of the most compelling and wide ranging sections of the book. Chapter 12 addresses the topic of allowing a site to interact with other services, such as those for WYSIWYG editing and XML parsing. Error handling is explored in Chapter 13, including errors within application code — from PHP itself and from business logic problems — and the database. The book's final chapter covers what the author refers to as "real content," by which he means the content contributed by administrators and users to a CMS, such as articles, comments, forum postings, calendar entries, and other items. The book's single appendix explains how to package an Aliro extension for release, and would most likely be of no interest to anyone not creating such extensions for distribution.

The book has few weaknesses. Occasionally the author will state something that could be misleading to the beginning programmer. For instance, on the first page of the first chapter (not an auspicious start) he refers to the World Wide Web as a markup language. On the contrary, the markup language used to create the Web, is HTML. As we are seeing more frequently in technical books, the writing itself could use a bit more editing — such as hyphens missing from adjective phrases in many locations in the text. Lastly, some programmers may find the author's GNU style of code formatting rather bizarre in appearance.

Overall, PHP programmers who are committed to following best practices in site security, code organization, database usage, and other important factors in any site development, will find plenty of ideas in this book to consider and possibly apply to their own coding. Readers who simply see the book's title, and perhaps browse quickly through its contents, may get the false impression that the information would only be of value to someone who wants to create their own CMS from scratch. The book may be of considerable value for such an effort, but it offers more than that. Many of the most critical issues in architecting and implementing a CMS, apply to non-CMS Web sites as well. Also, as a veteran of software development, the author conveys worthy advice on development practices — such as in the first chapter — regardless of the chosen computer language. In addition, for the growing number of developers who are exploring the inner workings of CMSs — usually with the idea of extending their functionality by writing modules — an appreciation for how the creator of a CMS thinks, could be helpful. Ideas are illustrated throughout with sample code — none of them excessive in length. PHP5 CMS Framework Development offers lessons in PHP 5 object-oriented programming and Web site development that goes beyond CMSs and Aliro.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase PHP5 CMS Framework Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the content management systems (CMSs) that a Web developer could use for creating a new site, the best ones allow the developer to extend the chosen CMS's capabilities, by adding new functionality, in the form of third-party modules. This is one of many reasons why Drupal is growing in popularity: Developers can choose from hundreds of Drupal modules but not all functionality that a developer might want has been captured in a module, and many of the modules are unfinished or otherwise limited in capabilities. Fortunately, PHP programmers can create their own modules, and one way to get up to speed is Learning Drupal 6 Module Development, authored by Matt Butcher." Learning Drupal 6 Module Development author Matt Butcher pages 328 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 1847194443 summary A step-by-step guide to creating new Drupal 6 modules Published on 10 May 2008 by Packt Publishing, under the ISBNs 1847194443 and 978-1847194442, the book is intended as a tutorial for developing your first Drupal 6 module; yet it also explains how to create themes and custom content types, how to use external XML APIs, and how to add AJAX functionality to your Drupal site using jQuery.

The book spans 328 pages, grouped into nine chapters, each devoted to a major topic of Drupal module development: Drupal's architecture and primary concepts (nodes, users, blocks, menus, etc.); an introduction to building a new module; Drupal's theme system, and how to create a custom one; module theming; using JavaScript, AJAX, and JSON; creating a custom administration module; creating a new content type, using the CCK; filters, input formats, hooks, actions, and triggers; installation profiles, how to develop one, and how to package a distribution. Throughout the book, the author illustrates key ideas by applying them to a sample Web site, named the Philosopher Bios. The material assumes that the reader has a solid understanding of the essentials of PHP and SQL, and familiarity with Drupal's administration area. But no advanced PHP or MySQL knowledge is required, nor prior experience creating Drupal modules and themes.

Packt Publishing has made available a Web page for the book, where visitors can order the book (print and electronic copies), download the book's sample code, provide feedback to the publisher, send in a question, read a summary of the book or the table of contents, and obtain a sample chapter (Chapter 2 — "Creating Our First Module"). One would expect to find a link to errata reported for this specific book, but this page does not have such a link. In fact, none of the book profile pages on Packt Publishing's site appear to have links to their respective errata. Instead, the visitor must go to their support page, specify the book of interest (the drop-down list should default to the last book review, but it does not), and finally click on the errata link, which should have been on the individual book's page. After clicking a link, a small and non-resizable browser window pops up, listing the known errata.

To Web developers unversed in Drupal's architecture and the use of modules to extend Drupal's core capabilities, the first chapter of this book should be quite valuable, because the author explains how Drupal's functionality has been logically organized into modules. For developers unfamiliar with CMS modules, the author sums it up nicely: "A module is a bundle of PHP code and supporting files that use Drupal's APIs and architecture to integrate new functional components into the Drupal framework." As noted earlier, the author presents overviews of the most critical Drupal concepts, including core modules, hooks, themes, nodes, comments, users, blocks, page rendering, menus, and forms. Unlike what is found in far too many programming books, the explanations in this chapter are generally quite complete, authoritative, and clear — with the exception of the last note on page 8 pertaining to system modules. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the demonstration site created in the book, as well as some developer tools recommended by the author.

In the second chapter, readers learn the basics of creating a module — in this case, one that accesses a philosophy reading list from Goodreads. Anyone who does not yet own a copy of the book, can quickly see the overall style of the book's information and presentation, by downloading the aforementioned sample chapter. There are few blemishes in this chapter: A short (and apparently non-facetious) phrase in one of the notes, "Drupal is meticulously documented..." (page 30), should come as a surprise to anyone who has stumbled into one of the gaps in Drupal's online documentation. The reader should beware that the code for the two private functions used in the sample module, differs between the book's code and that in the download archive, with no indication to the reader from either source as to which is to be preferred, if any. The book's code has other problems, as described in the errata. Also, tags such as "<channel/>" and "<item/>" may give the reader a false impression that those are empty tags (i.e., single tags, and not paired open/close tags). Unfortunately, this nonstandard and confusing notation is used throughout the book.

Theming a Web site is an important part of making it attractive and more usable to site visitors, and Drupal, like any solid CMS, has built-in support for applying themes to a site. In the third chapter, the author explores Drupal's theme system and theme engines, as well as how to create a new theme, and how to use Drupal's hook system for overriding a template function. The discussion is better than that seen in any other book, but could be further strengthened if the author were to explain the reasoning behind some of the suggested practices, such as making redundant copies of a parent theme's images for a sub-theme. Any readers implementing the "descartes" sub-theme should note that template.php, in the download code, begins with "<?" and not "<?php," which will cause problems if their PHP has short_open_tag set to Off. Chapter 5 extends the ideas presented earlier, and shows the reader how to create a new module with a default theme. The discussion of how to register a theme and, more specifically, the naming conventions, is in some places rather turgid — not due only to the writing, but partly Drupal's overriding scheme. But it does not help to have array keys such as "theme_function_name" mentioned in the text but not in the code (should it be "<theme function name>," following his earlier naming convention?). Partway through the fourth chapter, the author acknowledges that the reader may be getting lost in the terminology, and clarifies it. This is a worthy practice that could have been employed in several other places in the book (and by the authors of other programming books).

In the fifth chapter, readers will find a detailed discussion of how to leverage the power of AJAX, jQuery, and JSON to allow modules to refresh with changed content, without requiring Drupal to reload the entire Web page. Chapter 6 explains how to create a module with an administration interface, as well as how to use the powerful Forms API (FAPI), and the Mail API, among other Drupal capabilities available to the programmer. Creating a nontrivial content type that incorporate specialized fields, is the subject of Chapter 7. It is accomplished by building a new module, rather than the more common approach of using the Content Construction Kit (CCK). Readers will also benefit from an introduction to the Schema API, which is valuable for generating database-neutral SQL code. In Chapter 8, the author explains how to create content filters, actions, and hooks, as well as how to assign a trigger to an action. Like the previous two chapters, this one is fairly long and takes some work to fully digest, but doing so is essential for learning how to make the most of hooks, among the other topics. The author also shows how to indicate that your new module depends upon others. The final chapter covers installation profiles and packages, which allow the developer to put together a customized version of Drupal containing the new modules he or she has created, in addition to any dependent non-core modules.

Overall, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development accomplishes its primary goals, and provides information that would even be of interest to Drupal developers who may have no intention of ever creating their own modules and themes, but who would like to learn a lot more about Drupal's underlying architecture, and some of the differences between versions 5 and 6. The author tackled a difficult subject area, and presents enough explanations that would allow any experienced PHP programmer to work through the examples and learn from them. There are plenty of screenshots and diagrams, all of which are helpful. However, a few of the screenshots are intended to show color changes, which makes no sense because all of the screenshots are grayscale only. Rather than choosing orange and pink and other colors, distinct shades of gray would probably have been a better approach.

The book's remaining flaws — aside from those noted above — are relatively minor. The chapter summaries are of no value, and could be dropped in the interests of making the book leaner. Some of the paragraphs are overly short, and should be combined with adjacent ones (e.g., "Here is one very good reason."; page 111). Some of the phrasing is weak (e.g., "has got better and better"; page 18), confusing (e.g., "a typical template work"; page 60), or incorrect (e.g., "uninspiring"; should read "uninspired"; page 70). Other similar problems are identified in the book's errata. The author misses many opportunities to use commas to improve the text's readability, and even uses them incorrectly with parentheses (page 64). Some proper names do not have correct title case, such as "Windows explorer" (page 35). Throughout the manuscript, "hookname" should instead read "hook name." The possessive term "its" should contain no apostrophe (page 185, for example). Occasionally, a (non-critical) word is missing, such as in "content is main content" (page 33). Yet in none of these instances should the alert reader be unable to determine what the author is stating.

None of the weaknesses identified above detract from the overall value of the book. As of this writing, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development is the most promising and information-rich resource for Drupal developers interested in creating their own modules and themes.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor."

You can purchase Learning Drupal 6 Module Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the content management systems (CMSs) that a Web developer could use for creating a new site, the best ones allow the developer to extend the chosen CMS's capabilities, by adding new functionality, in the form of third-party modules. This is one of many reasons why Drupal is growing in popularity: Developers can choose from hundreds of Drupal modules but not all functionality that a developer might want has been captured in a module, and many of the modules are unfinished or otherwise limited in capabilities. Fortunately, PHP programmers can create their own modules, and one way to get up to speed is Learning Drupal 6 Module Development, authored by Matt Butcher." Learning Drupal 6 Module Development author Matt Butcher pages 328 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 1847194443 summary A step-by-step guide to creating new Drupal 6 modules Published on 10 May 2008 by Packt Publishing, under the ISBNs 1847194443 and 978-1847194442, the book is intended as a tutorial for developing your first Drupal 6 module; yet it also explains how to create themes and custom content types, how to use external XML APIs, and how to add AJAX functionality to your Drupal site using jQuery.

The book spans 328 pages, grouped into nine chapters, each devoted to a major topic of Drupal module development: Drupal's architecture and primary concepts (nodes, users, blocks, menus, etc.); an introduction to building a new module; Drupal's theme system, and how to create a custom one; module theming; using JavaScript, AJAX, and JSON; creating a custom administration module; creating a new content type, using the CCK; filters, input formats, hooks, actions, and triggers; installation profiles, how to develop one, and how to package a distribution. Throughout the book, the author illustrates key ideas by applying them to a sample Web site, named the Philosopher Bios. The material assumes that the reader has a solid understanding of the essentials of PHP and SQL, and familiarity with Drupal's administration area. But no advanced PHP or MySQL knowledge is required, nor prior experience creating Drupal modules and themes.

Packt Publishing has made available a Web page for the book, where visitors can order the book (print and electronic copies), download the book's sample code, provide feedback to the publisher, send in a question, read a summary of the book or the table of contents, and obtain a sample chapter (Chapter 2 — "Creating Our First Module"). One would expect to find a link to errata reported for this specific book, but this page does not have such a link. In fact, none of the book profile pages on Packt Publishing's site appear to have links to their respective errata. Instead, the visitor must go to their support page, specify the book of interest (the drop-down list should default to the last book review, but it does not), and finally click on the errata link, which should have been on the individual book's page. After clicking a link, a small and non-resizable browser window pops up, listing the known errata.

To Web developers unversed in Drupal's architecture and the use of modules to extend Drupal's core capabilities, the first chapter of this book should be quite valuable, because the author explains how Drupal's functionality has been logically organized into modules. For developers unfamiliar with CMS modules, the author sums it up nicely: "A module is a bundle of PHP code and supporting files that use Drupal's APIs and architecture to integrate new functional components into the Drupal framework." As noted earlier, the author presents overviews of the most critical Drupal concepts, including core modules, hooks, themes, nodes, comments, users, blocks, page rendering, menus, and forms. Unlike what is found in far too many programming books, the explanations in this chapter are generally quite complete, authoritative, and clear — with the exception of the last note on page 8 pertaining to system modules. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the demonstration site created in the book, as well as some developer tools recommended by the author.

In the second chapter, readers learn the basics of creating a module — in this case, one that accesses a philosophy reading list from Goodreads. Anyone who does not yet own a copy of the book, can quickly see the overall style of the book's information and presentation, by downloading the aforementioned sample chapter. There are few blemishes in this chapter: A short (and apparently non-facetious) phrase in one of the notes, "Drupal is meticulously documented..." (page 30), should come as a surprise to anyone who has stumbled into one of the gaps in Drupal's online documentation. The reader should beware that the code for the two private functions used in the sample module, differs between the book's code and that in the download archive, with no indication to the reader from either source as to which is to be preferred, if any. The book's code has other problems, as described in the errata. Also, tags such as "<channel/>" and "<item/>" may give the reader a false impression that those are empty tags (i.e., single tags, and not paired open/close tags). Unfortunately, this nonstandard and confusing notation is used throughout the book.

Theming a Web site is an important part of making it attractive and more usable to site visitors, and Drupal, like any solid CMS, has built-in support for applying themes to a site. In the third chapter, the author explores Drupal's theme system and theme engines, as well as how to create a new theme, and how to use Drupal's hook system for overriding a template function. The discussion is better than that seen in any other book, but could be further strengthened if the author were to explain the reasoning behind some of the suggested practices, such as making redundant copies of a parent theme's images for a sub-theme. Any readers implementing the "descartes" sub-theme should note that template.php, in the download code, begins with "<?" and not "<?php," which will cause problems if their PHP has short_open_tag set to Off. Chapter 5 extends the ideas presented earlier, and shows the reader how to create a new module with a default theme. The discussion of how to register a theme and, more specifically, the naming conventions, is in some places rather turgid — not due only to the writing, but partly Drupal's overriding scheme. But it does not help to have array keys such as "theme_function_name" mentioned in the text but not in the code (should it be "<theme function name>," following his earlier naming convention?). Partway through the fourth chapter, the author acknowledges that the reader may be getting lost in the terminology, and clarifies it. This is a worthy practice that could have been employed in several other places in the book (and by the authors of other programming books).

In the fifth chapter, readers will find a detailed discussion of how to leverage the power of AJAX, jQuery, and JSON to allow modules to refresh with changed content, without requiring Drupal to reload the entire Web page. Chapter 6 explains how to create a module with an administration interface, as well as how to use the powerful Forms API (FAPI), and the Mail API, among other Drupal capabilities available to the programmer. Creating a nontrivial content type that incorporate specialized fields, is the subject of Chapter 7. It is accomplished by building a new module, rather than the more common approach of using the Content Construction Kit (CCK). Readers will also benefit from an introduction to the Schema API, which is valuable for generating database-neutral SQL code. In Chapter 8, the author explains how to create content filters, actions, and hooks, as well as how to assign a trigger to an action. Like the previous two chapters, this one is fairly long and takes some work to fully digest, but doing so is essential for learning how to make the most of hooks, among the other topics. The author also shows how to indicate that your new module depends upon others. The final chapter covers installation profiles and packages, which allow the developer to put together a customized version of Drupal containing the new modules he or she has created, in addition to any dependent non-core modules.

Overall, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development accomplishes its primary goals, and provides information that would even be of interest to Drupal developers who may have no intention of ever creating their own modules and themes, but who would like to learn a lot more about Drupal's underlying architecture, and some of the differences between versions 5 and 6. The author tackled a difficult subject area, and presents enough explanations that would allow any experienced PHP programmer to work through the examples and learn from them. There are plenty of screenshots and diagrams, all of which are helpful. However, a few of the screenshots are intended to show color changes, which makes no sense because all of the screenshots are grayscale only. Rather than choosing orange and pink and other colors, distinct shades of gray would probably have been a better approach.

The book's remaining flaws — aside from those noted above — are relatively minor. The chapter summaries are of no value, and could be dropped in the interests of making the book leaner. Some of the paragraphs are overly short, and should be combined with adjacent ones (e.g., "Here is one very good reason."; page 111). Some of the phrasing is weak (e.g., "has got better and better"; page 18), confusing (e.g., "a typical template work"; page 60), or incorrect (e.g., "uninspiring"; should read "uninspired"; page 70). Other similar problems are identified in the book's errata. The author misses many opportunities to use commas to improve the text's readability, and even uses them incorrectly with parentheses (page 64). Some proper names do not have correct title case, such as "Windows explorer" (page 35). Throughout the manuscript, "hookname" should instead read "hook name." The possessive term "its" should contain no apostrophe (page 185, for example). Occasionally, a (non-critical) word is missing, such as in "content is main content" (page 33). Yet in none of these instances should the alert reader be unable to determine what the author is stating.

None of the weaknesses identified above detract from the overall value of the book. As of this writing, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development is the most promising and information-rich resource for Drupal developers interested in creating their own modules and themes.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor."

You can purchase Learning Drupal 6 Module Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Many Web developers wish to create e-commerce sites that also support collaborative editing of content, community forums, and other features that can increase traffic to the sites. But most shopping cart products do not include those capabilities, or, if such third-party add-ons exist, they may be quite limited in functionality. Similarly, most if not all content management systems (CMSs) lack native e-commerce capabilities. Yet that barrier is being overcome, because a handful of e-commerce modules have been created for the most popular CMSs. Perhaps the most promising pairing, at this time, is Drupal and the e-Commerce module — a combination covered in the book Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce by Michael Peacock." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce author Michael Peacock pages 264 publisher Packt Publishing rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 1847194060 summary A thorough guide to the Drupal e-Commerce This title was published by Packt Publishing on 31 March 2008, under the ISBNs 1847194060 and 978-1847194060, and is a recent addition to their growing lineup of books focusing on Drupal and Joomla. The firm hosts the book's Web page, where readers can download the sample code, submit feedback, post a question about the book, read an online excerpt, and download a sample chapter (number 8) on "Creating a Better Selling Experience," as a PDF file. In addition, readers can purchase the handy e-book version, which contains everything found in the print version.

The first chapter serves as an introduction to Drupal and the e-Commerce module, and also explains how to download the two of them, as well as the additional module (Token) upon which the latter depends. The author explains the purpose of each area within Drupal's "Site configuration" section, and what changes the reader should make, if any. Also, he provides the background story for the sample e-commerce Web site that is built throughout the book — in this case, a dinosaur model shop. It should be noted that the diagram on page 6 does an effective job of explaining the basic idea of how a CMS works (better than the similar figures seen in other CMS books), and it is followed by an explanation of what e-commerce is. However, it is doubtful that any developer who purchased this book would need to be told what are CMSs and e-commerce.

In the second chapter, the author briefly reviews the steps for adding content and navigation to a Drupal-powered site, by adding pages and menus, respectively. Also, some additional modules are enabled, for creating a contact form and a blog, for the sample site. Up to this point in the book, readers will have become accustomed to the author explicitly guiding them through the steps necessary for creating the sample site. Thus it may come as a surprise to such readers when they see the second figure on page 40, showing the navigation menu, including new sections for dinosaurs and the museum, and a link to a contact page. The two new sections were briefly mentioned three pages earlier, but the steps for creating them were not; the steps for adding the contact page link were apparently not mentioned anywhere. However, any experienced Drupal developer should have no difficulty figuring out how to add these navigation menu items.

With the third chapter, the book shifts focus from Drupal basics to implementing an e-commerce site. Aspects of running an online business — such as site accessibility laws, legal issues, and privacy laws — are mentioned, though readers outside of the United Kingdom will most likely not be pleased by the UK-centricity of the material. Other topics covered include product types, groupings, details, photos, and advertising, as well as customer service.

In Chapter 4, readers learn about the e-Commerce product types and their corresponding modules, and how to add products to the store catalog — including specialized types of products, such as apparel, services, and bundled products ("parcels"). Chapter 5 briefly covers users, rules, permissions, settings, rules, registration, e-mail messages to users, users' pictures, taxonomy, requiring registration, customer management, user orders, contacting users, and adding your business's staff to your site. It also touches upon taxonomy and how to use it for controlling user access to content. But the author fails to explain why this is needed for the online store. Providing such a rationale up front is especially important when asking readers to work their way through potentially daunting subjects such as taxonomy, and implementing them in their own test sites, if they are following what the author is doing.

The sixth chapter begins with an unneeded review of the themes built into Drupal version 5.x, with even more space taken up describing three red-based color schemes. This is followed by a discussion of how to modify whichever of those themes is enabled, and, very briefly, how to create a new theme. In this chapter and many others, the author frequently reminds us that the hypothetical client, Doug of Doug's Dinos, is "really pleased" with the "great looking site." Readers can judge for themselves just how great is the site's design. Admittedly, in a book such as this that does not focus on Web design, a sample site can be quite basic. But the constant praise is unwarranted.

Allowing customer checkout and payment are critical to any e-commerce site, and those topics are explored in Chapter 7. The topic coverage is fairly complete, though occasionally the author does not make clear where in the Drupal administration section the reader will find the particular topic under discussion, e.g., the global anonymous purchase policy. Chapter 8 offers a lot of valuable information, including how to: add shopping cart and search elements to every page, automatically create user accounts, add images to product listings, offer discounts based on customer role, provide coupons, allow bulk purchasing, set up auction and donation products, and automatically adjust charge prices based on various conditions.

Chapter 9 delves into the particulars of calculating taxes and shipping costs, as well as accepting payments through various gateways, including PayPal, which is explored in detail. The only part that will be misleading to readers, is the claim that PayPal's IPN "pings" your server for each customer transaction. Actually, their server does not ping yours, but instead posts transaction data that you can use for updating your online database.

Chapter 10 presents a number of modules and techniques for making an e-commerce site more secure, and also covers domain name, Web hosting, and site maintenance issues. The security modules discussed are definitely worth considering. Some readers may be confused by the Backups section of cPanel mentioned by the author, since not all cPanel installations offer it.

The last two chapters of the book address invoicing, CRM, and marketing one's site. The discussions of search engine optimization, viral marketing, newsletters, etc., are quite cursory, and readers interested in those topics would fare better by consulting books, online articles, and other resources that are much more thorough. The chapter's topic that will probably be of most value to e-commerce developers, is the demonstration of how to significantly customize the layout of invoices, using CSS. The book's sole appendix explains how to install WampServer.

All the chapters conclude with brief summaries, which, without exception, are a waste of space — especially considering the brevity of most of the chapters. The old oratory principle of "tell them what you're going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them" may be terrific for speeches, but not for books. That is primarily because someone in an audience listening to a live speech does not have the luxury of looking into the past to hear a portion of the speech again, nor of looking into the future to anticipate what the speaker will say next. Readers of books, on the other hand, can of course jump backward and forward quickly to review or preview material, as needed.

The quality of the book's writing is noticeably weak, with countless awkward phrases and run-on sentences. Some are downright puzzling, e.g., "Thanks for your custom!" (page 125); did the author mean "order?" Throughout the book, one finds a remarkable underuse of commas, frequent mixing up of "that" and "which," misplacement of commas and parentheses, misuse of commas in place of semicolons and even periods (e.g., page 124), semicolons in place of colons, and missing hyphens from adjective phrases. Most noticeable — and at times laughable — is the excessive use of exclamation marks, reflecting a common misconception that they jazz up otherwise dull material. For example, page 49 contains three completely unnecessary exclamation marks, not counting the two contained within a customer testimonial. In addition, the book contains several errata, such as: "loose" (should read "lose"; pages 8 and 195), "leads customers" (should read "leads to customers"; page 57), "products" (should read "product's"; page 62), "customers' role" (should read "customers' roles"; page 88), "to mentioned" (should read "to mention"; page 131), "its does" (page 159), "If a more" (should read "If more"; page 202), "businesses" (should read "business's"; page 221), and many more.

An additional blemish of the book, albeit minor, is that there is little consistency in how the author describes to the reader the navigation steps for going to a particular area of Drupal administration. Sometimes he presents a breadcrumb-style menu path, starting with the highest level menu item. (The majority of readers would probably find this to be the most logical format.) On other occasions, he reverses the order and describes it narratively. Least useful is his listing of the URL, such as "http://localhost/drupal-5.7/admin/users/roles," which may not even match the Drupal root URL that the reader has set up in their development environment.

Despite the aforementioned problems, Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce is a welcome addition to the growing list of more specialized Drupal titles, and is currently the premier resource for anyone who wishes to use Drupal and the e-Commerce module for creating a virtual store.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Many Web developers wish to create e-commerce sites that also support collaborative editing of content, community forums, and other features that can increase traffic to the sites. But most shopping cart products do not include those capabilities, or, if such third-party add-ons exist, they may be quite limited in functionality. Similarly, most if not all content management systems (CMSs) lack native e-commerce capabilities. Yet that barrier is being overcome, because a handful of e-commerce modules have been created for the most popular CMSs. Perhaps the most promising pairing, at this time, is Drupal and the e-Commerce module — a combination covered in the book Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce by Michael Peacock." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce author Michael Peacock pages 264 publisher Packt Publishing rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 1847194060 summary A thorough guide to the Drupal e-Commerce This title was published by Packt Publishing on 31 March 2008, under the ISBNs 1847194060 and 978-1847194060, and is a recent addition to their growing lineup of books focusing on Drupal and Joomla. The firm hosts the book's Web page, where readers can download the sample code, submit feedback, post a question about the book, read an online excerpt, and download a sample chapter (number 8) on "Creating a Better Selling Experience," as a PDF file. In addition, readers can purchase the handy e-book version, which contains everything found in the print version.

The first chapter serves as an introduction to Drupal and the e-Commerce module, and also explains how to download the two of them, as well as the additional module (Token) upon which the latter depends. The author explains the purpose of each area within Drupal's "Site configuration" section, and what changes the reader should make, if any. Also, he provides the background story for the sample e-commerce Web site that is built throughout the book — in this case, a dinosaur model shop. It should be noted that the diagram on page 6 does an effective job of explaining the basic idea of how a CMS works (better than the similar figures seen in other CMS books), and it is followed by an explanation of what e-commerce is. However, it is doubtful that any developer who purchased this book would need to be told what are CMSs and e-commerce.

In the second chapter, the author briefly reviews the steps for adding content and navigation to a Drupal-powered site, by adding pages and menus, respectively. Also, some additional modules are enabled, for creating a contact form and a blog, for the sample site. Up to this point in the book, readers will have become accustomed to the author explicitly guiding them through the steps necessary for creating the sample site. Thus it may come as a surprise to such readers when they see the second figure on page 40, showing the navigation menu, including new sections for dinosaurs and the museum, and a link to a contact page. The two new sections were briefly mentioned three pages earlier, but the steps for creating them were not; the steps for adding the contact page link were apparently not mentioned anywhere. However, any experienced Drupal developer should have no difficulty figuring out how to add these navigation menu items.

With the third chapter, the book shifts focus from Drupal basics to implementing an e-commerce site. Aspects of running an online business — such as site accessibility laws, legal issues, and privacy laws — are mentioned, though readers outside of the United Kingdom will most likely not be pleased by the UK-centricity of the material. Other topics covered include product types, groupings, details, photos, and advertising, as well as customer service.

In Chapter 4, readers learn about the e-Commerce product types and their corresponding modules, and how to add products to the store catalog — including specialized types of products, such as apparel, services, and bundled products ("parcels"). Chapter 5 briefly covers users, rules, permissions, settings, rules, registration, e-mail messages to users, users' pictures, taxonomy, requiring registration, customer management, user orders, contacting users, and adding your business's staff to your site. It also touches upon taxonomy and how to use it for controlling user access to content. But the author fails to explain why this is needed for the online store. Providing such a rationale up front is especially important when asking readers to work their way through potentially daunting subjects such as taxonomy, and implementing them in their own test sites, if they are following what the author is doing.

The sixth chapter begins with an unneeded review of the themes built into Drupal version 5.x, with even more space taken up describing three red-based color schemes. This is followed by a discussion of how to modify whichever of those themes is enabled, and, very briefly, how to create a new theme. In this chapter and many others, the author frequently reminds us that the hypothetical client, Doug of Doug's Dinos, is "really pleased" with the "great looking site." Readers can judge for themselves just how great is the site's design. Admittedly, in a book such as this that does not focus on Web design, a sample site can be quite basic. But the constant praise is unwarranted.

Allowing customer checkout and payment are critical to any e-commerce site, and those topics are explored in Chapter 7. The topic coverage is fairly complete, though occasionally the author does not make clear where in the Drupal administration section the reader will find the particular topic under discussion, e.g., the global anonymous purchase policy. Chapter 8 offers a lot of valuable information, including how to: add shopping cart and search elements to every page, automatically create user accounts, add images to product listings, offer discounts based on customer role, provide coupons, allow bulk purchasing, set up auction and donation products, and automatically adjust charge prices based on various conditions.

Chapter 9 delves into the particulars of calculating taxes and shipping costs, as well as accepting payments through various gateways, including PayPal, which is explored in detail. The only part that will be misleading to readers, is the claim that PayPal's IPN "pings" your server for each customer transaction. Actually, their server does not ping yours, but instead posts transaction data that you can use for updating your online database.

Chapter 10 presents a number of modules and techniques for making an e-commerce site more secure, and also covers domain name, Web hosting, and site maintenance issues. The security modules discussed are definitely worth considering. Some readers may be confused by the Backups section of cPanel mentioned by the author, since not all cPanel installations offer it.

The last two chapters of the book address invoicing, CRM, and marketing one's site. The discussions of search engine optimization, viral marketing, newsletters, etc., are quite cursory, and readers interested in those topics would fare better by consulting books, online articles, and other resources that are much more thorough. The chapter's topic that will probably be of most value to e-commerce developers, is the demonstration of how to significantly customize the layout of invoices, using CSS. The book's sole appendix explains how to install WampServer.

All the chapters conclude with brief summaries, which, without exception, are a waste of space — especially considering the brevity of most of the chapters. The old oratory principle of "tell them what you're going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them" may be terrific for speeches, but not for books. That is primarily because someone in an audience listening to a live speech does not have the luxury of looking into the past to hear a portion of the speech again, nor of looking into the future to anticipate what the speaker will say next. Readers of books, on the other hand, can of course jump backward and forward quickly to review or preview material, as needed.

The quality of the book's writing is noticeably weak, with countless awkward phrases and run-on sentences. Some are downright puzzling, e.g., "Thanks for your custom!" (page 125); did the author mean "order?" Throughout the book, one finds a remarkable underuse of commas, frequent mixing up of "that" and "which," misplacement of commas and parentheses, misuse of commas in place of semicolons and even periods (e.g., page 124), semicolons in place of colons, and missing hyphens from adjective phrases. Most noticeable — and at times laughable — is the excessive use of exclamation marks, reflecting a common misconception that they jazz up otherwise dull material. For example, page 49 contains three completely unnecessary exclamation marks, not counting the two contained within a customer testimonial. In addition, the book contains several errata, such as: "loose" (should read "lose"; pages 8 and 195), "leads customers" (should read "leads to customers"; page 57), "products" (should read "product's"; page 62), "customers' role" (should read "customers' roles"; page 88), "to mentioned" (should read "to mention"; page 131), "its does" (page 159), "If a more" (should read "If more"; page 202), "businesses" (should read "business's"; page 221), and many more.

An additional blemish of the book, albeit minor, is that there is little consistency in how the author describes to the reader the navigation steps for going to a particular area of Drupal administration. Sometimes he presents a breadcrumb-style menu path, starting with the highest level menu item. (The majority of readers would probably find this to be the most logical format.) On other occasions, he reverses the order and describes it narratively. Least useful is his listing of the URL, such as "http://localhost/drupal-5.7/admin/users/roles," which may not even match the Drupal root URL that the reader has set up in their development environment.

Despite the aforementioned problems, Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce is a welcome addition to the growing list of more specialized Drupal titles, and is currently the premier resource for anyone who wishes to use Drupal and the e-Commerce module for creating a virtual store.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "For computer programmers who do not have a solid understanding of object-oriented programming (OOP), learning the C# programming language can be rather challenging, even if they have experience with C or C++, which at least would give them a head start over non-C programmers. Any developer in this situation may well want to begin the learning process with a book that aims to teach both OOP and C# in as gentle a manner as possible, with plenty of patient explanations and illustrative diagrams — such as those found in the book Head First C# by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. Head First C# author Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene pages 778 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross with Greg Hanson ISBN 0596514824 summary A heavily illustrated intro to object-oriented programming and C# Published by O'Reilly Media on 26 November 2007, under the ISBNs 0596514824 and 978-0596514822, Head First C# is one in a series of "Brain-Friendly Guides." The introduction to this particular book discusses how the series attempts to present the concepts and technical material in a way that is far more intellectually compelling and memorable than the approach currently taken by most books. Some of their guiding principles include: making things visual, oftentimes using novel and even outlandish diagrams; using a casual and conversational style; engaging the reader through exercises and questions; and spicing up the discussions with humor.

On the book's Web page, readers will find links to download the book's sample code, participate in a forum dedicated to the book, register their copy of the book, read and submit any errata (of which there are many), and submit a reader review and read those of other readers.

The book's material is organized into 15 chapters, covering the topics in a progressive order that would probably be most helpful for the inexperienced developer: the advantages to programming visual applications in C# and the Microsoft Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE); building a simple application to get started; the C# code produced by Visual Studio; basic C# language constructs; an introduction to objects and their components; data types, including arrays and references, and how C# allows you to work with them; protecting an object's data from unintended access, through encapsulation; extending classes through inheritance and subclasses; finding and using class interfaces, and the advantages of doing so; storing data in arrays, lists, and dictionaries; saving data in files and directories, as well as working with file streams and serialization; exceptions and debugging techniques; event handling; how to build complex applications; creating user interfaces with controls and graphics; object destruction and garbage collection; and connecting your C# programs to databases using LINQ. Interspersed throughout the book are three C# labs, which encourage the reader to put into practice their new programming skills, and thus better internalize the ideas of OOP and C# covered in the chapters preceding each lab. The lab applications comprise a racetrack simulator, a simple adventure game, and a re-creation of Space Invaders.

When they see this book for the first time, some prospective readers may be overwhelmed by its size, clocking in at 778 pages. Yet a sizable portion of those pages will read faster than those of the typical programming book, largely due to all of the diagrams and whitespace, which really help to break up the material and make it more digestible. However, what many might perceive to be a strength of the book, could be seen as a weakness by others. In fact, if the unnecessary diagrams and redundant material were to be removed from the book, it might end up only half its current size. But this may only be a deterrent for people who are carrying this book around, or who tend to be impatient and wish to get right to the point of any book they are reading, or who may be upset by the extra trees chopped down to double the number of pages (the book does not appear to have been printed on recycled paper).

Despite Head First C# being clearly intended as an introductory book to object-oriented programming in general, and C# in particular, the target audience especially may be frustrated by all of the errata and other sources of confusion that they will encounter. This is especially true when readers are doing their best to implement all of the sample applications, and struggling when, for instance, the code does not match the figure provided, or even the code on another page. For example, on page 50, the authors instruct the reader to drag a new PictureBox onto a new form, but readers will probably struggle to figure out where to drag it from. On page 105, the authors instruct the reader to flip back and look through the code, to fill in some class diagrams, but they don't clarify what code should be considered. Readers' comments on the online bookseller sites, list far more similar problems. In fact, that there are so many technical errors in this book is quite remarkable given that the technical review team comprised no fewer than 14 individuals! How could so many eyeballs miss so much?

The authors make a real point of reviewing material explained earlier, which generally is an effective approach for this type of book. But the repetition sometimes becomes excessive — enough to annoy even the greenest novice. For example, on page 445, we find the question: "Okay, I still don't get it. Sorry. Why are there so many different kinds of exceptions, again?"

On the other hand, the book has some real strengths, including those mentioned above for making the material more approachable. In particular, when the reader becomes accustomed to the visual style of presenting concepts, he or she will probably find it a faster approach to learning the ideas. Admittedly, veteran developers may still prefer the more narrative style of conventional programming books — especially when they encounter rather convoluted diagrams, such as that on page 292. Yet the illustrations are particularly potent for explaining interfaces, as done in Chapter 7.

Although the book will be of most value to newer programmers, experienced C# programmers will find topics of interest and perhaps even some language details and analysis that they have never previously encountered. For instance, some of the questions posed in the sections titled "there are no Dumb Questions," could be valuable — such as the comparison of File versus FileInfo, and when to use one over the other. Also, some of the utilities could help the reader for future development, such as the hex dumper program on page 432.

Sadly, Head First C# is weighed down by excessive redundancy and an errata-to-number-of-technical-reviewers ratio possibly unequaled by any other programming book. Yet, for any programmer new to object orientation and C#, this introductory book should prove an extremely comprehensible and reader-friendly resource.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor. Contributor Greg Hanson is a C# programmer in Fort Collins, Colorado.

You can purchase Head First C# from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "For computer programmers who do not have a solid understanding of object-oriented programming (OOP), learning the C# programming language can be rather challenging, even if they have experience with C or C++, which at least would give them a head start over non-C programmers. Any developer in this situation may well want to begin the learning process with a book that aims to teach both OOP and C# in as gentle a manner as possible, with plenty of patient explanations and illustrative diagrams — such as those found in the book Head First C# by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. Head First C# author Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene pages 778 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross with Greg Hanson ISBN 0596514824 summary A heavily illustrated intro to object-oriented programming and C# Published by O'Reilly Media on 26 November 2007, under the ISBNs 0596514824 and 978-0596514822, Head First C# is one in a series of "Brain-Friendly Guides." The introduction to this particular book discusses how the series attempts to present the concepts and technical material in a way that is far more intellectually compelling and memorable than the approach currently taken by most books. Some of their guiding principles include: making things visual, oftentimes using novel and even outlandish diagrams; using a casual and conversational style; engaging the reader through exercises and questions; and spicing up the discussions with humor.

On the book's Web page, readers will find links to download the book's sample code, participate in a forum dedicated to the book, register their copy of the book, read and submit any errata (of which there are many), and submit a reader review and read those of other readers.

The book's material is organized into 15 chapters, covering the topics in a progressive order that would probably be most helpful for the inexperienced developer: the advantages to programming visual applications in C# and the Microsoft Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE); building a simple application to get started; the C# code produced by Visual Studio; basic C# language constructs; an introduction to objects and their components; data types, including arrays and references, and how C# allows you to work with them; protecting an object's data from unintended access, through encapsulation; extending classes through inheritance and subclasses; finding and using class interfaces, and the advantages of doing so; storing data in arrays, lists, and dictionaries; saving data in files and directories, as well as working with file streams and serialization; exceptions and debugging techniques; event handling; how to build complex applications; creating user interfaces with controls and graphics; object destruction and garbage collection; and connecting your C# programs to databases using LINQ. Interspersed throughout the book are three C# labs, which encourage the reader to put into practice their new programming skills, and thus better internalize the ideas of OOP and C# covered in the chapters preceding each lab. The lab applications comprise a racetrack simulator, a simple adventure game, and a re-creation of Space Invaders.

When they see this book for the first time, some prospective readers may be overwhelmed by its size, clocking in at 778 pages. Yet a sizable portion of those pages will read faster than those of the typical programming book, largely due to all of the diagrams and whitespace, which really help to break up the material and make it more digestible. However, what many might perceive to be a strength of the book, could be seen as a weakness by others. In fact, if the unnecessary diagrams and redundant material were to be removed from the book, it might end up only half its current size. But this may only be a deterrent for people who are carrying this book around, or who tend to be impatient and wish to get right to the point of any book they are reading, or who may be upset by the extra trees chopped down to double the number of pages (the book does not appear to have been printed on recycled paper).

Despite Head First C# being clearly intended as an introductory book to object-oriented programming in general, and C# in particular, the target audience especially may be frustrated by all of the errata and other sources of confusion that they will encounter. This is especially true when readers are doing their best to implement all of the sample applications, and struggling when, for instance, the code does not match the figure provided, or even the code on another page. For example, on page 50, the authors instruct the reader to drag a new PictureBox onto a new form, but readers will probably struggle to figure out where to drag it from. On page 105, the authors instruct the reader to flip back and look through the code, to fill in some class diagrams, but they don't clarify what code should be considered. Readers' comments on the online bookseller sites, list far more similar problems. In fact, that there are so many technical errors in this book is quite remarkable given that the technical review team comprised no fewer than 14 individuals! How could so many eyeballs miss so much?

The authors make a real point of reviewing material explained earlier, which generally is an effective approach for this type of book. But the repetition sometimes becomes excessive — enough to annoy even the greenest novice. For example, on page 445, we find the question: "Okay, I still don't get it. Sorry. Why are there so many different kinds of exceptions, again?"

On the other hand, the book has some real strengths, including those mentioned above for making the material more approachable. In particular, when the reader becomes accustomed to the visual style of presenting concepts, he or she will probably find it a faster approach to learning the ideas. Admittedly, veteran developers may still prefer the more narrative style of conventional programming books — especially when they encounter rather convoluted diagrams, such as that on page 292. Yet the illustrations are particularly potent for explaining interfaces, as done in Chapter 7.

Although the book will be of most value to newer programmers, experienced C# programmers will find topics of interest and perhaps even some language details and analysis that they have never previously encountered. For instance, some of the questions posed in the sections titled "there are no Dumb Questions," could be valuable — such as the comparison of File versus FileInfo, and when to use one over the other. Also, some of the utilities could help the reader for future development, such as the hex dumper program on page 432.

Sadly, Head First C# is weighed down by excessive redundancy and an errata-to-number-of-technical-reviewers ratio possibly unequaled by any other programming book. Yet, for any programmer new to object orientation and C#, this introductory book should prove an extremely comprehensible and reader-friendly resource.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor. Contributor Greg Hanson is a C# programmer in Fort Collins, Colorado.

You can purchase Head First C# from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the content management systems (CMSs) from which a Web developer can choose for creating a new Web site, Joomla is generally considered to be one of the top choices -- partly because an experienced developer can create an attractive site faster with Joomla than with the majority of other CMSs. However, Joomla's online documentation leaves much to be desired, as is true for most if not all CMSs. Intermediate and especially new developers need a clear and comprehensive resource that can explain the terminology, customization, administrative panel, and other aspects of Joomla. A promising candidate is a book written by Barrie M. North, titled Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Joomla! A User's Guide author Barrie M. North pages 480 publisher Prentice Hall PTR rating 8 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 0136135609 summary learn how to create and manage a website powered by Joomla! It was published by Prentice Hall, under the ISBNs 0136135609 and 978-0136135609, on 21 December 2007 (although page 233 confusingly suggests that the material was written in November 2006). The book is available not only in print, but in electronic form as well, as part of the Safari Books Online library. On the publisher's Web page for the book, visitors can read the table of contents, the preface, and the index. Also, they can download a sample chapter -- "Creating a Pure CSS Template" -- as a PDF file. Lastly, visitors can check for updates to the book's content, i.e., reported errata, of which there are more than half a dozen, as of this writing.

The majority of the book's 480 pages are organized into 12 chapters, covering a number of topics: an introduction to CMSs and Joomla; installing Joomla; administration basics; content management; menus; extensions; WYSIWYG editing of content; search engine optimization (SEO); building a table-less template; and how to build Joomla sites for a school, a restaurant, and a blog. Four appendices cover: getting help on your Joomla problems; case studies; SEO basics; and installing WAMP5. The book offers plenty of screenshots, which make it possible for someone to follow the discussion even when away from their computer. Sadly, much of the text shown in the illustrations is extremely small, and could prove very difficult to read for anyone with diminished vision. Even some of the captions are so small as to almost require the use of a magnifying glass. Moreover, the illustrations are printed in light gray, which makes the situation even worse.

The intended purpose of the book is "to guide a non-technical user step-by-step in learning how to create and manage a website powered by Joomla" (page 7). The book is definitely geared towards people new to Joomla, and even new to Web development, given the amount of elementary material covered, such as the author's explanation of Joomla's need for a Web server.

In the preface, the author touches upon the growing popularity of Joomla for a wide variety of Web sites. He also mentions that PHP and CSS are not prerequisites for understanding the book; however, readers not well experienced in those technologies will struggle in implementing everything described in the book -- especially templates -- and this is substantiated by readers' comments online. Admittedly, a book that provided adequate coverage of PHP, CSS, and then Joomla, would likely be overwhelming in length. Readers unfamiliar with PHP and CSS should first secure a basic grounding in those technologies, prior to trying to create their own templates or other Joomla extensions. On the other hand, if a reader has no intention of creating any extensions of their own, then they can still use Joomla to build a new Web site, and use this book to learn how to do so.

In the first chapter, the author provides a valuable introduction to CMSs and the advantages they offer in separating content from the Web pages themselves. However, he refers to Joomla as a rebranding of Mambo, while it would be much more accurate to characterize it as a derivative project, having forked from Mambo, which still exists (sort of). The author also lists Joomla's major features, and the basic elements of a Joomla-powered Web site. Installing and configuring a CMS -- particularly for the first time -- is oftentimes a major stumbling block for any Web development newbie. Chapter 2 steps the reader through the process of downloading and installing the latest version of Joomla (the book uses version 1.5 RC1).

In the third chapter, the author explains the most commonly used administrative tasks, and how to accomplish them in the Joomla 1.5 administrative panel. He intentionally does not cover all of the administrative settings, and this may prove frustrating to some readers who are looking for comprehensive coverage. Yet he does note that such readers should consult the official Joomla User Manual. Also available is the Administrator Manual. The fourth chapter describes in detail how Joomla displays content in pages, how it organizes that content in sections and categories, and the role played by the Front Page component. It concludes with a discussion of how to create menu items and how to connect them to components, as well as how to use module content. Especially valuable to Joomla beginners is the explanation of the two methods of deciding what content appears on a site's homepage.

As noted in the preface, the relationship among menus, menu items, pages, and modules, is one of the most confusing aspects of Joomla -- even after the improvements with version 1.5. In Chapter 5, the author explains this relationship, and then the major menu layouts and how to control them using the various sets of parameters. He mentions the overriding of global settings, and this points up how, prior to this, the book should have explained where to change those global settings, and recommended values. The index is of no help, because they are not mentioned. In Chapter 6, the author shows how to install and manage extensions, which comprise components, modules, plug-ins, templates, and languages. (Templates were missing from his list presented in the book's preface.) Chapter 7 examines the use of WYSIWYG editors for changing content on the back-end and front-end.

The most functional and attractive Joomla-powered Web site will be of little value if it receives few visitors. Thus, search engine marketing (SEM), discussed in the eighth chapter, is of critical importance, and the author's largely sensible advice is worth reading -- despite the nonsensical reference to cowboys and cowgirls (on page 198), and his reference to the "miserable failure" Google bomb, which was diffused back in January 2007. Note that the links provided to the SEM tools strongly recommended by the author -- WordTracker, PR Prowler, and Perry Marshall -- are affiliate referral links. Thus it seems disingenuous when he writes "...this might be the place I would have a few affiliate links!" (emphasis added). Speaking of emphasis, it seems as if too much weight is given to resources from which the author would receive affiliate compensation. This is not what readers typically expect in a book for which they have paid good money. Also discussed in the chapter are the important topics of Web standards, accessibility, keywords, referral traffic, pay-per-click traffic, Google AdWords, e-mail traffic, and common SEM mistakes. He correctly points out the low SEM value of Joomla's native "Read more..." anchor text. But his recommended solution, a mambot from Run Digital, does not appear to work with Joomla version 1.5.

Most of the templates written for Joomla and Mambo have used tables for page layout, instead of the more accessible and efficient CSS approach. CSS- based templates are only now becoming increasingly available, and Chapter 9 furthers this worthy goal by stepping the reader through the development of a pure CSS template. As noted earlier, readers unfamiliar with CSS will most likely find this chapter quite daunting, if not disheartening. The book's overall tutorial approach kicks into full gear in the last three chapters, in which the author shows in great detail how to create Web sites for a school, a restaurant, and a blog site. This material could prove very helpful to readers who wish to review and put into practice the more theoretical ideas introduced in the earlier chapters.

In general, readers should be pleased with this book. Even though the author is clearly a fan of Joomla, and the tone of the book is positive, he does not hesitate to point out Joomla's flaws, such as the misleading name of a module type. This is rare among technical authors nowadays, and for this Barrie North should be commended. Yet it is odd that he does not mention the obvious misspelling, "Imagess," in Extensions > Module Manager > module > Other Parameters.

Sprinkled throughout all of the chapters, the reader will find short paragraphs, with a dark background, labeled "The Least You Need to Know." These summarize the preceding paragraphs. This could perhaps be justified after a significant number of paragraphs, but unfortunately they also appear after just a couple paragraphs, which makes these "LYNTK" boxes redundant and unnecessary. Even worse, every chapter ends with a summary, which further repeats the boxes' content. With the book nearing 500 pages, the chapter summaries and even the LYNTK boxes should be excised, to good effect. Also, most of the chapters contain at least one footnote, which are not located at the bottom of the page or collected in a special section at the end of the book (as is traditional), but instead listed at the end of the chapter. Such material should instead be integrated into the text, if it is important enough to be included in the book, or left out entirely.

The writing quality of the book is generally solid, and the writing style is straightforward and friendly. Yet it does contain some blemishes that should have been caught by the publisher's editors, e.g., multi-word adjectives missing hyphens; misuse of the terms "that" versus "who"; inconsistent use of lowercase and title case for Joomla roles, even in the same paragraph; the same inconsistency in menu names, such as in Chapter 4; and the inexcusable "try and explain" (should read "try to explain"; page 19, among others). Thankfully, the author intentionally leaves off the silly exclamation mark from the Joomla name, starting after the preface, for greater readability. The book contains some misspellings/errata, such as "eXtensible" (page 2), "Wordpress" (pages 7 and 8), "over writing" (page 22), "Cpanel" (pages 27 and 29), "php html" (page 148), "api" (page 150), "flash" (page 209), "sight" (should read "site"; page 221), and "add fee" (should read "ad fee"; page 225). The author incorrectly states that the acronym PHP stands for only "Hypertext Preprocessor," but it actually is now a recursive acronym of "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor."

Overall, the book's production quality is up to snuff. The book stays open fairly well, despite the absence of any special lay-flat binding. The pages were produced using recycled paper, which is always encouraging to see. Unfortunately, the pages are thinner than in any other technical book I have ever seen, thereby allowing the text on the other side of each page to show through. This exacerbates the aforementioned problem of the text within the figures being difficult to read. Moreover, all of the copies that I have seen have an unusual diagonal ridge along the bottom edge, suggesting that the page cutting machinery was malfunctioning -- at least for one batch of copies produced, and perhaps more. In addition, some of the pages have small ink blotches. At a list price of almost $45, the book might seem a bit pricey. But online bookstores are fully discounting it, such as Amazon.com's current price of under $30.

The book may have some minor weaknesses, noted above, but otherwise, Joomla! A User's Guide is a logically organized and potentially quite valuable resource for beginning and intermediate Joomla developers -- perhaps the best Joomla book currently available.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase Joomla! A User's Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the content management systems (CMSs) from which a Web developer can choose for creating a new Web site, Joomla is generally considered to be one of the top choices -- partly because an experienced developer can create an attractive site faster with Joomla than with the majority of other CMSs. However, Joomla's online documentation leaves much to be desired, as is true for most if not all CMSs. Intermediate and especially new developers need a clear and comprehensive resource that can explain the terminology, customization, administrative panel, and other aspects of Joomla. A promising candidate is a book written by Barrie M. North, titled Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Joomla! A User's Guide author Barrie M. North pages 480 publisher Prentice Hall PTR rating 8 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 0136135609 summary learn how to create and manage a website powered by Joomla! It was published by Prentice Hall, under the ISBNs 0136135609 and 978-0136135609, on 21 December 2007 (although page 233 confusingly suggests that the material was written in November 2006). The book is available not only in print, but in electronic form as well, as part of the Safari Books Online library. On the publisher's Web page for the book, visitors can read the table of contents, the preface, and the index. Also, they can download a sample chapter -- "Creating a Pure CSS Template" -- as a PDF file. Lastly, visitors can check for updates to the book's content, i.e., reported errata, of which there are more than half a dozen, as of this writing.

The majority of the book's 480 pages are organized into 12 chapters, covering a number of topics: an introduction to CMSs and Joomla; installing Joomla; administration basics; content management; menus; extensions; WYSIWYG editing of content; search engine optimization (SEO); building a table-less template; and how to build Joomla sites for a school, a restaurant, and a blog. Four appendices cover: getting help on your Joomla problems; case studies; SEO basics; and installing WAMP5. The book offers plenty of screenshots, which make it possible for someone to follow the discussion even when away from their computer. Sadly, much of the text shown in the illustrations is extremely small, and could prove very difficult to read for anyone with diminished vision. Even some of the captions are so small as to almost require the use of a magnifying glass. Moreover, the illustrations are printed in light gray, which makes the situation even worse.

The intended purpose of the book is "to guide a non-technical user step-by-step in learning how to create and manage a website powered by Joomla" (page 7). The book is definitely geared towards people new to Joomla, and even new to Web development, given the amount of elementary material covered, such as the author's explanation of Joomla's need for a Web server.

In the preface, the author touches upon the growing popularity of Joomla for a wide variety of Web sites. He also mentions that PHP and CSS are not prerequisites for understanding the book; however, readers not well experienced in those technologies will struggle in implementing everything described in the book -- especially templates -- and this is substantiated by readers' comments online. Admittedly, a book that provided adequate coverage of PHP, CSS, and then Joomla, would likely be overwhelming in length. Readers unfamiliar with PHP and CSS should first secure a basic grounding in those technologies, prior to trying to create their own templates or other Joomla extensions. On the other hand, if a reader has no intention of creating any extensions of their own, then they can still use Joomla to build a new Web site, and use this book to learn how to do so.

In the first chapter, the author provides a valuable introduction to CMSs and the advantages they offer in separating content from the Web pages themselves. However, he refers to Joomla as a rebranding of Mambo, while it would be much more accurate to characterize it as a derivative project, having forked from Mambo, which still exists (sort of). The author also lists Joomla's major features, and the basic elements of a Joomla-powered Web site. Installing and configuring a CMS -- particularly for the first time -- is oftentimes a major stumbling block for any Web development newbie. Chapter 2 steps the reader through the process of downloading and installing the latest version of Joomla (the book uses version 1.5 RC1).

In the third chapter, the author explains the most commonly used administrative tasks, and how to accomplish them in the Joomla 1.5 administrative panel. He intentionally does not cover all of the administrative settings, and this may prove frustrating to some readers who are looking for comprehensive coverage. Yet he does note that such readers should consult the official Joomla User Manual. Also available is the Administrator Manual. The fourth chapter describes in detail how Joomla displays content in pages, how it organizes that content in sections and categories, and the role played by the Front Page component. It concludes with a discussion of how to create menu items and how to connect them to components, as well as how to use module content. Especially valuable to Joomla beginners is the explanation of the two methods of deciding what content appears on a site's homepage.

As noted in the preface, the relationship among menus, menu items, pages, and modules, is one of the most confusing aspects of Joomla -- even after the improvements with version 1.5. In Chapter 5, the author explains this relationship, and then the major menu layouts and how to control them using the various sets of parameters. He mentions the overriding of global settings, and this points up how, prior to this, the book should have explained where to change those global settings, and recommended values. The index is of no help, because they are not mentioned. In Chapter 6, the author shows how to install and manage extensions, which comprise components, modules, plug-ins, templates, and languages. (Templates were missing from his list presented in the book's preface.) Chapter 7 examines the use of WYSIWYG editors for changing content on the back-end and front-end.

The most functional and attractive Joomla-powered Web site will be of little value if it receives few visitors. Thus, search engine marketing (SEM), discussed in the eighth chapter, is of critical importance, and the author's largely sensible advice is worth reading -- despite the nonsensical reference to cowboys and cowgirls (on page 198), and his reference to the "miserable failure" Google bomb, which was diffused back in January 2007. Note that the links provided to the SEM tools strongly recommended by the author -- WordTracker, PR Prowler, and Perry Marshall -- are affiliate referral links. Thus it seems disingenuous when he writes "...this might be the place I would have a few affiliate links!" (emphasis added). Speaking of emphasis, it seems as if too much weight is given to resources from which the author would receive affiliate compensation. This is not what readers typically expect in a book for which they have paid good money. Also discussed in the chapter are the important topics of Web standards, accessibility, keywords, referral traffic, pay-per-click traffic, Google AdWords, e-mail traffic, and common SEM mistakes. He correctly points out the low SEM value of Joomla's native "Read more..." anchor text. But his recommended solution, a mambot from Run Digital, does not appear to work with Joomla version 1.5.

Most of the templates written for Joomla and Mambo have used tables for page layout, instead of the more accessible and efficient CSS approach. CSS- based templates are only now becoming increasingly available, and Chapter 9 furthers this worthy goal by stepping the reader through the development of a pure CSS template. As noted earlier, readers unfamiliar with CSS will most likely find this chapter quite daunting, if not disheartening. The book's overall tutorial approach kicks into full gear in the last three chapters, in which the author shows in great detail how to create Web sites for a school, a restaurant, and a blog site. This material could prove very helpful to readers who wish to review and put into practice the more theoretical ideas introduced in the earlier chapters.

In general, readers should be pleased with this book. Even though the author is clearly a fan of Joomla, and the tone of the book is positive, he does not hesitate to point out Joomla's flaws, such as the misleading name of a module type. This is rare among technical authors nowadays, and for this Barrie North should be commended. Yet it is odd that he does not mention the obvious misspelling, "Imagess," in Extensions > Module Manager > module > Other Parameters.

Sprinkled throughout all of the chapters, the reader will find short paragraphs, with a dark background, labeled "The Least You Need to Know." These summarize the preceding paragraphs. This could perhaps be justified after a significant number of paragraphs, but unfortunately they also appear after just a couple paragraphs, which makes these "LYNTK" boxes redundant and unnecessary. Even worse, every chapter ends with a summary, which further repeats the boxes' content. With the book nearing 500 pages, the chapter summaries and even the LYNTK boxes should be excised, to good effect. Also, most of the chapters contain at least one footnote, which are not located at the bottom of the page or collected in a special section at the end of the book (as is traditional), but instead listed at the end of the chapter. Such material should instead be integrated into the text, if it is important enough to be included in the book, or left out entirely.

The writing quality of the book is generally solid, and the writing style is straightforward and friendly. Yet it does contain some blemishes that should have been caught by the publisher's editors, e.g., multi-word adjectives missing hyphens; misuse of the terms "that" versus "who"; inconsistent use of lowercase and title case for Joomla roles, even in the same paragraph; the same inconsistency in menu names, such as in Chapter 4; and the inexcusable "try and explain" (should read "try to explain"; page 19, among others). Thankfully, the author intentionally leaves off the silly exclamation mark from the Joomla name, starting after the preface, for greater readability. The book contains some misspellings/errata, such as "eXtensible" (page 2), "Wordpress" (pages 7 and 8), "over writing" (page 22), "Cpanel" (pages 27 and 29), "php html" (page 148), "api" (page 150), "flash" (page 209), "sight" (should read "site"; page 221), and "add fee" (should read "ad fee"; page 225). The author incorrectly states that the acronym PHP stands for only "Hypertext Preprocessor," but it actually is now a recursive acronym of "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor."

Overall, the book's production quality is up to snuff. The book stays open fairly well, despite the absence of any special lay-flat binding. The pages were produced using recycled paper, which is always encouraging to see. Unfortunately, the pages are thinner than in any other technical book I have ever seen, thereby allowing the text on the other side of each page to show through. This exacerbates the aforementioned problem of the text within the figures being difficult to read. Moreover, all of the copies that I have seen have an unusual diagonal ridge along the bottom edge, suggesting that the page cutting machinery was malfunctioning -- at least for one batch of copies produced, and perhaps more. In addition, some of the pages have small ink blotches. At a list price of almost $45, the book might seem a bit pricey. But online bookstores are fully discounting it, such as Amazon.com's current price of under $30.

The book may have some minor weaknesses, noted above, but otherwise, Joomla! A User's Guide is a logically organized and potentially quite valuable resource for beginning and intermediate Joomla developers -- perhaps the best Joomla book currently available.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase Joomla! A User's Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Web developers are oftentimes under pressure to build attractive sites as quickly as possible, and thus they are increasingly making use of content management systems (CMSs), which offer most of the functionality typically needed in a site, such as user authentication, site-wide styling, and of course managing content contributed by site owners and users. Joomla is an extremely popular and heavily-used CMS, partly because it is one of the easiest to install, configure, and use as a starting point for a new site. But with all CMSs, Joomla's online documentation and forums can prove frustrating to the new developer. Books such as the recently published Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 are intended to fill that gap." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 author Hagen Graf pages 384 publisher Packt Publishing rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 184719530X summary An introductory-level guide to the latest version of Joomla. Written by Hagen Graf, with a guest chapter by Angie Radtke, Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 was published on 28 March 2008 by Packt Publishing, under the ISBNs 184719530X and 978-1847195302. It is an update of his earlier book, Building Websites with Joomla! v1.0, put out by the same publisher. Like the previous edition, this latest one is aimed at beginning and intermediate Web developers who wish to learn how to make the most of Joomla for building new sites or maintaining existing ones that they have inherited.

The author has organized the book's material into 17 chapters and seven appendices, covering the major topics of interest to Joomla developers: terms, concepts, and sample sites; Joomla installation; a site's major elements; customization of language, and by templates; the administrative interface; the primary menus (Site, Menus, Content, Components, and Extensions); some commonly used tools; some popular extensions; writing templates; accessibility; MVC, components, modules, and plug-ins; building a sample site; and analysis of some bonus templates. The book's 384 pages conclude with a rather sparse index.

On the publisher's Web page, visitors can read more about the book, download the sample code, post feedback or a question, read the online table of contents, and download a sample chapter, namely, the second one in the book, on Joomla installation. The publishers also make it possible to purchase an electronic version of the book, which could be especially handy for any reader who would like to reference the book while working off-site, and without lugging the print version along with their laptop.

The publisher's site characterizes it as a "fast paced tutorial," but the book gets off to a slow start, on a micro level and on a macro level. The first eight paragraphs are devoted to explaining the concept of a content management system, and its variations, which is essentially a waste of space for the typical reader of such a book. Any developer interested in reading a Joomla book certainly does not need such a lengthy explication. If the purpose is to enlighten people unfamiliar with how Web applications work, then more care should be devoted to clarifying phrases that would confuse such neophytes, such as "the net." In fact, most of the introductory material could be excised or summarized. In addition, Mac users will not be pleased with the PC centricity, unremedied until Chapter 2. The first chapter later bogs down in a wearisome comparison of a Web site with a piece of real estate. Throughout the chapter, the level of discussion alternates between quite simplistic — presumably for the complete neophyte — to intermediate. It is as if the author realizes that there is a tremendous amount of material to cover, and thus needs to move along at a decent pace — one that can be comprehensible to intermediate programmers — and yet occasionally interjects overly simple material, in the hopes of not leaving behind the newbies. Overall, it doesn't work, and the chapter in particular, and the book in general, should instead target Web developers who have some experience with CMSs, or at least basic Web site creation.

The second chapter explains what underlying technologies are needed in conjunction with Joomla, and how to install them for testing. Readers should note that page 31 may give the impression that XAMPP is the only available package that includes Apache, MySQL, and PHP — but it is not. The third chapter provides a nice overview of the various major components on the homepage of a brand new Joomla site. One minor flaw is in the image on page 52, in which the "Resources" menu should be placed above the "Key Concepts" menu, as seen on page 54 and as seen by the reader if they are following along using their own Joomla installation (a practice highly recommended by both the book's author and this author).

Chapter 4 demonstrates how to install a different language for the public site and the administrator site — in this case, German. Readers whose primary or only language is English may be confused as to why the author begins the detailed Joomla coverage with this more specialized topic, rather than starting with the material found at the beginning of the next chapter. It is possible that the author concluded that the rest of the reading audience would want to first install the language module for their primary language, which makes sense. On page 68, the author refers to the template named Kepri as "previously introduced," but I can't find where this was done, and the index is of no help (it does not even have a section for the letter K). Far more confusing, and irritating, is when authors make reference to some file that the reader cannot find. For example, Hagen Graf instructs the reader to "download the language files from the German translation team's website." Sure, but where? Four pages later, we are told to upload tmpl_bertrand.zip, but not where to find the file. It turns out that it is in 5302_Code/chapter 16/, in the downloadable sample code from the publisher's site.

The fifth chapter is almost as short as the fourth one, and briefly describes the configuration of the Joomla administration site. The author recommends that readers still using Internet Explorer switch over to Mozilla Firefox (amen), yet oddly describes Firefox as two different browsers. There are some other minor flaws: The list of 17 toolbar elements, on page 72, would be more efficient if it were alphabetized. The second illustration on page 73 supposedly shows the results of filtering for enabled modules only, and yet the drop-down menu does not reflect that. The version numbers stated in the text on page 77, do not match those shown in the illustration on that page. Yet none of these blemishes lessen the value of the material.

Chapter 6 covers the Site menu, whose components can be accessed directly from the menu items or from icons on the Control Panel page. The author asserts that the icons allow faster access, but actually the menu items are more direct. The chapter is informative, and would be more so if the author explained what is really happening with — and how to utilize — debug messages ("Debug Language").

Chapters 7 through 10 go into the details of the Menus, Content, Components, and Extensions menus. Most of the explanations are straightforward, except that on page 143, whose third paragraph is downright baffling; also, the "Default Section Layout" and "Archive Blog" display formats mentioned are not available or even shown in the illustration on the previous page. On the first page of the seventh chapter, the author begins to introduce "an example from joomlart.com," but apparently forgot to include the example itself. Also, in the discussion of "Parameters — Component," the last two options — Target and Icon — were neglected.

Chapter 11 briefly describes three of the built-in tools, and Chapter 12 shows the reader how to install some popular extensions for customizable message boards, document management, and image galleries. The coverage of the extensions is enough to get the reader started, but the author really should explain why the reader would need to reboot their computer after installing Fireboard (page 203), or even restart the Apache server, if that is what the author meant.

With Chapters 13 through 15, Hagen Graf shifts to Joomla topics that would be of most interest to veteran Web programmers: how to develop your own templates, components, modules, and plug-ins. Sadly, at this critical juncture, the narrative and sample code become noticeably more muddled and confusing than what is found in the earlier chapters (which mostly consist of explaining the individual controls within Joomla's administrative area, and are thus easier to get right). For instance, to readers unfamiliar with div tags (likely a minority), the author recommends "selfhtml," without explaining what or where it is; presumably it is the German site SELFHTML, which is of no value to the English language readers of this book. Further on, the template provided in the downloadable code styles one's Joomla site as if no template were even in use, and not like the preview thumbnail image. The author's reference on page 229 to "one command" is baffling, and the publisher's left-justification of all the CSS rules makes the template's CSS even less readable. By the time readers reach the section titled "Integration of the Joomla! Module," they may be quite frustrated, and asking themselves, "What Joomla module?!" — despite the author's self-congratulatory comment "this has worked so well."

Chapter 14 was written by Angie Radtke, co-creator of the increasingly popular Beez template, which offers a lot more flexibility than most if not all other Joomla templates. She discusses Web accessibility ("barrier freedom") in general, and as implemented in particular by her template. The general discussion would be of interest to anyone unfamiliar with how to make Web sites more accessible, and is more thorough than what is found in some other Web design books. The template discussion would primarily be valuable to anyone developing a new template — especially one based upon Beez — and who is otherwise not aware of accessibility considerations. However, in any future editions, the HTML and CSS code should certainly be formatted better. For more advanced Joomla developers, Chapter 15 may be the most compelling one of all, because it describes how to create your own components, modules, and plug-ins — starting with an overview of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern.

In the penultimate chapter, the author steps through the process of setting up a simple Web site (in this case, for a winery). Working through the example will help readers solidify the knowledge they gained in the earlier chapters. It would also be handy for someone proficient with CMSs who simply wants to try Joomla in the least amount of time — somewhat like a quick-start guide. The book states that Joomla does not have an e-commerce shop component. Presumably the author is referring to the fact that, at the time of his book's writing, VirtueMart did not yet support Joomla 1.5; the latest release apparently does. Lastly, much of the vintner story is superfluous and could be condensed or cut. The last chapter briefly discusses a number of available templates. The book concludes with seven appendices, most quite brief: online resources; jdoc details; two methods for changing a template logo; a link to the Joomla API; how to reset the admin password; how to migrate a Joomla version 1.0 site to 1.5; the PHP register_globals setting apropos of Joomla security.

Like so many technical books, this one certainly has its noticeable strengths and weaknesses. The author's high regard for Joomla, as well as his extensive experience with it, is truly evident throughout his book. Also, he does touch upon all the major areas that would be of interest to the Joomla programmer.

However, the book's writing could be cleaned up and clarified a great deal. It could certainly use a lot more well-placed commas to increase readability — especially for the many run-on sentences — and far fewer exclamation marks. On a larger scale, the chapter summaries add no value and should be cut. The book contains many compound adjectives lacking hyphens, just as there are a few complete statements incorrectly separated by commas and not semicolons. Many of the expressions are rather odd and puzzling; for instance, "graphic scripts" (page 250), "easiest solution nothing shifts" (page 258), and "barrier freedom" instead of the much more universal term "accessibility." Non-German readers may be turned off by the book's German centricity. Furthermore, readers don't need to be told, twice, that the German translations were done by the German translation team. The book contains at least 49 errata (which I have reported to the publisher). These do not include countless instances of the term "that" being used incorrectly in place of "who," by both the primary and guest authors. Given the considerable number of errors, the reader may begin to wonder whether the book was edited prior to production.

The book falters most when it veers away from Joomla administration toward marketing and business topics. For instance, eBay is characterized as a "flea market" (page 55), but it is more of an online auction. On the same page, the discussion on advertising, frozen spinach, etc., adds no value to the book, could easily puzzle readers, and is somewhat disjointed from the topic at hand — contradicting the author's assertion that the book is cohesive (same page). Overall, the book could use a fair amount of trimming.

In terms of the book's production, the quality is fine, but Packt Publishing is the only technical publisher that I know of that insists upon using a glossy ink, which makes the book's pages somewhat difficult to read depending upon the angle of one's reading light as it bounces off the page. Also, whoever set the text on the pages should have refrained from removing most of the indentation from the code.

From an editing perspective, Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 is in need of considerable improvement — especially those passages that will prove most confusing to readers. But from a technical perspective, the book offers a lot of valuable information to new Joomla developers, and could easily become the preferred resource that they turn to when building their first Joomla Web sites.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Web developers are oftentimes under pressure to build attractive sites as quickly as possible, and thus they are increasingly making use of content management systems (CMSs), which offer most of the functionality typically needed in a site, such as user authentication, site-wide styling, and of course managing content contributed by site owners and users. Joomla is an extremely popular and heavily-used CMS, partly because it is one of the easiest to install, configure, and use as a starting point for a new site. But with all CMSs, Joomla's online documentation and forums can prove frustrating to the new developer. Books such as the recently published Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 are intended to fill that gap." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 author Hagen Graf pages 384 publisher Packt Publishing rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 184719530X summary An introductory-level guide to the latest version of Joomla. Written by Hagen Graf, with a guest chapter by Angie Radtke, Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 was published on 28 March 2008 by Packt Publishing, under the ISBNs 184719530X and 978-1847195302. It is an update of his earlier book, Building Websites with Joomla! v1.0, put out by the same publisher. Like the previous edition, this latest one is aimed at beginning and intermediate Web developers who wish to learn how to make the most of Joomla for building new sites or maintaining existing ones that they have inherited.

The author has organized the book's material into 17 chapters and seven appendices, covering the major topics of interest to Joomla developers: terms, concepts, and sample sites; Joomla installation; a site's major elements; customization of language, and by templates; the administrative interface; the primary menus (Site, Menus, Content, Components, and Extensions); some commonly used tools; some popular extensions; writing templates; accessibility; MVC, components, modules, and plug-ins; building a sample site; and analysis of some bonus templates. The book's 384 pages conclude with a rather sparse index.

On the publisher's Web page, visitors can read more about the book, download the sample code, post feedback or a question, read the online table of contents, and download a sample chapter, namely, the second one in the book, on Joomla installation. The publishers also make it possible to purchase an electronic version of the book, which could be especially handy for any reader who would like to reference the book while working off-site, and without lugging the print version along with their laptop.

The publisher's site characterizes it as a "fast paced tutorial," but the book gets off to a slow start, on a micro level and on a macro level. The first eight paragraphs are devoted to explaining the concept of a content management system, and its variations, which is essentially a waste of space for the typical reader of such a book. Any developer interested in reading a Joomla book certainly does not need such a lengthy explication. If the purpose is to enlighten people unfamiliar with how Web applications work, then more care should be devoted to clarifying phrases that would confuse such neophytes, such as "the net." In fact, most of the introductory material could be excised or summarized. In addition, Mac users will not be pleased with the PC centricity, unremedied until Chapter 2. The first chapter later bogs down in a wearisome comparison of a Web site with a piece of real estate. Throughout the chapter, the level of discussion alternates between quite simplistic — presumably for the complete neophyte — to intermediate. It is as if the author realizes that there is a tremendous amount of material to cover, and thus needs to move along at a decent pace — one that can be comprehensible to intermediate programmers — and yet occasionally interjects overly simple material, in the hopes of not leaving behind the newbies. Overall, it doesn't work, and the chapter in particular, and the book in general, should instead target Web developers who have some experience with CMSs, or at least basic Web site creation.

The second chapter explains what underlying technologies are needed in conjunction with Joomla, and how to install them for testing. Readers should note that page 31 may give the impression that XAMPP is the only available package that includes Apache, MySQL, and PHP — but it is not. The third chapter provides a nice overview of the various major components on the homepage of a brand new Joomla site. One minor flaw is in the image on page 52, in which the "Resources" menu should be placed above the "Key Concepts" menu, as seen on page 54 and as seen by the reader if they are following along using their own Joomla installation (a practice highly recommended by both the book's author and this author).

Chapter 4 demonstrates how to install a different language for the public site and the administrator site — in this case, German. Readers whose primary or only language is English may be confused as to why the author begins the detailed Joomla coverage with this more specialized topic, rather than starting with the material found at the beginning of the next chapter. It is possible that the author concluded that the rest of the reading audience would want to first install the language module for their primary language, which makes sense. On page 68, the author refers to the template named Kepri as "previously introduced," but I can't find where this was done, and the index is of no help (it does not even have a section for the letter K). Far more confusing, and irritating, is when authors make reference to some file that the reader cannot find. For example, Hagen Graf instructs the reader to "download the language files from the German translation team's website." Sure, but where? Four pages later, we are told to upload tmpl_bertrand.zip, but not where to find the file. It turns out that it is in 5302_Code/chapter 16/, in the downloadable sample code from the publisher's site.

The fifth chapter is almost as short as the fourth one, and briefly describes the configuration of the Joomla administration site. The author recommends that readers still using Internet Explorer switch over to Mozilla Firefox (amen), yet oddly describes Firefox as two different browsers. There are some other minor flaws: The list of 17 toolbar elements, on page 72, would be more efficient if it were alphabetized. The second illustration on page 73 supposedly shows the results of filtering for enabled modules only, and yet the drop-down menu does not reflect that. The version numbers stated in the text on page 77, do not match those shown in the illustration on that page. Yet none of these blemishes lessen the value of the material.

Chapter 6 covers the Site menu, whose components can be accessed directly from the menu items or from icons on the Control Panel page. The author asserts that the icons allow faster access, but actually the menu items are more direct. The chapter is informative, and would be more so if the author explained what is really happening with — and how to utilize — debug messages ("Debug Language").

Chapters 7 through 10 go into the details of the Menus, Content, Components, and Extensions menus. Most of the explanations are straightforward, except that on page 143, whose third paragraph is downright baffling; also, the "Default Section Layout" and "Archive Blog" display formats mentioned are not available or even shown in the illustration on the previous page. On the first page of the seventh chapter, the author begins to introduce "an example from joomlart.com," but apparently forgot to include the example itself. Also, in the discussion of "Parameters — Component," the last two options — Target and Icon — were neglected.

Chapter 11 briefly describes three of the built-in tools, and Chapter 12 shows the reader how to install some popular extensions for customizable message boards, document management, and image galleries. The coverage of the extensions is enough to get the reader started, but the author really should explain why the reader would need to reboot their computer after installing Fireboard (page 203), or even restart the Apache server, if that is what the author meant.

With Chapters 13 through 15, Hagen Graf shifts to Joomla topics that would be of most interest to veteran Web programmers: how to develop your own templates, components, modules, and plug-ins. Sadly, at this critical juncture, the narrative and sample code become noticeably more muddled and confusing than what is found in the earlier chapters (which mostly consist of explaining the individual controls within Joomla's administrative area, and are thus easier to get right). For instance, to readers unfamiliar with div tags (likely a minority), the author recommends "selfhtml," without explaining what or where it is; presumably it is the German site SELFHTML, which is of no value to the English language readers of this book. Further on, the template provided in the downloadable code styles one's Joomla site as if no template were even in use, and not like the preview thumbnail image. The author's reference on page 229 to "one command" is baffling, and the publisher's left-justification of all the CSS rules makes the template's CSS even less readable. By the time readers reach the section titled "Integration of the Joomla! Module," they may be quite frustrated, and asking themselves, "What Joomla module?!" — despite the author's self-congratulatory comment "this has worked so well."

Chapter 14 was written by Angie Radtke, co-creator of the increasingly popular Beez template, which offers a lot more flexibility than most if not all other Joomla templates. She discusses Web accessibility ("barrier freedom") in general, and as implemented in particular by her template. The general discussion would be of interest to anyone unfamiliar with how to make Web sites more accessible, and is more thorough than what is found in some other Web design books. The template discussion would primarily be valuable to anyone developing a new template — especially one based upon Beez — and who is otherwise not aware of accessibility considerations. However, in any future editions, the HTML and CSS code should certainly be formatted better. For more advanced Joomla developers, Chapter 15 may be the most compelling one of all, because it describes how to create your own components, modules, and plug-ins — starting with an overview of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern.

In the penultimate chapter, the author steps through the process of setting up a simple Web site (in this case, for a winery). Working through the example will help readers solidify the knowledge they gained in the earlier chapters. It would also be handy for someone proficient with CMSs who simply wants to try Joomla in the least amount of time — somewhat like a quick-start guide. The book states that Joomla does not have an e-commerce shop component. Presumably the author is referring to the fact that, at the time of his book's writing, VirtueMart did not yet support Joomla 1.5; the latest release apparently does. Lastly, much of the vintner story is superfluous and could be condensed or cut. The last chapter briefly discusses a number of available templates. The book concludes with seven appendices, most quite brief: online resources; jdoc details; two methods for changing a template logo; a link to the Joomla API; how to reset the admin password; how to migrate a Joomla version 1.0 site to 1.5; the PHP register_globals setting apropos of Joomla security.

Like so many technical books, this one certainly has its noticeable strengths and weaknesses. The author's high regard for Joomla, as well as his extensive experience with it, is truly evident throughout his book. Also, he does touch upon all the major areas that would be of interest to the Joomla programmer.

However, the book's writing could be cleaned up and clarified a great deal. It could certainly use a lot more well-placed commas to increase readability — especially for the many run-on sentences — and far fewer exclamation marks. On a larger scale, the chapter summaries add no value and should be cut. The book contains many compound adjectives lacking hyphens, just as there are a few complete statements incorrectly separated by commas and not semicolons. Many of the expressions are rather odd and puzzling; for instance, "graphic scripts" (page 250), "easiest solution nothing shifts" (page 258), and "barrier freedom" instead of the much more universal term "accessibility." Non-German readers may be turned off by the book's German centricity. Furthermore, readers don't need to be told, twice, that the German translations were done by the German translation team. The book contains at least 49 errata (which I have reported to the publisher). These do not include countless instances of the term "that" being used incorrectly in place of "who," by both the primary and guest authors. Given the considerable number of errors, the reader may begin to wonder whether the book was edited prior to production.

The book falters most when it veers away from Joomla administration toward marketing and business topics. For instance, eBay is characterized as a "flea market" (page 55), but it is more of an online auction. On the same page, the discussion on advertising, frozen spinach, etc., adds no value to the book, could easily puzzle readers, and is somewhat disjointed from the topic at hand — contradicting the author's assertion that the book is cohesive (same page). Overall, the book could use a fair amount of trimming.

In terms of the book's production, the quality is fine, but Packt Publishing is the only technical publisher that I know of that insists upon using a glossy ink, which makes the book's pages somewhat difficult to read depending upon the angle of one's reading light as it bounces off the page. Also, whoever set the text on the pages should have refrained from removing most of the indentation from the code.

From an editing perspective, Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 is in need of considerable improvement — especially those passages that will prove most confusing to readers. But from a technical perspective, the book offers a lot of valuable information to new Joomla developers, and could easily become the preferred resource that they turn to when building their first Joomla Web sites.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "For creating Web sites, developers are increasingly making use of content management systems (CMSs), any of which can provide the framework for a new site. But just as there are many similarities among all the leading CMSs, there are some significant differences, such as how easy they are to install, administer, and build upon, for creating new sites. If developer loyalty is any measure of the present and future success of a CMS, then Drupal should be considered a standout among other CMSs. For instance, its online documentation alone is often cited as a distinguishing advantage. But most developers would prefer learning Drupal from a book, such as Building Powerful and Robust Websites With Drupal 6, by David Mercer." Keep reading below for the rest of Michael's review. Building Powerful and Robust Websites With Drupal 6 author David Mercer pages 380 publisher Packt Publishing rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 1847192971 summary A comprehensive, readable, and upbeat guide to Drupal 6. This particular book was published on 1 February 2008, under the ISBNs 1847192971 and 978-1847192974. It is one of the latest titles from Packt Publishing, a relatively new technical publishing firm that is nonetheless gaining a reputation for its support of the open source software movement, including open source CMSs such as Drupal and Joomla. The firm's "about us" page notes that, with the purchase of every book that covers an open source technology, they pay a royalty to that open source project. A recent article on the Drupal Web site states that the company has raised more than $100,000 through these open source royalties.

In his book's "About the Author" section, David Mercer mentions that this title is a follow-up to a first edition of the book, even though the publication information that follows the title page, mentions nothing about this being a second edition. Most likely he is referring to his 2006 book titled Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites, which covered Drupal version 4.7.

The publisher makes available a Web page devoted to the book, where readers can download the sample code, submit feedback, post a question about the book, read an online excerpt, and obtain a sample chapter, on "Advanced Content," as a PDF file. Readers can also purchase the electronic version of the book, which contains everything found in the print version. For any programmer who plans on developing Drupal sites on a laptop, while away from their home or office technical library, the e-book version could prove especially valuable and convenient.

Building Powerful and Robust Websites With Drupal 6 aims to cover all the major aspects of using Drupal, and is targeted at Drupal beginners, though the author does state in the preface that the book's broad coverage may be helpful to intermediate users. The information spans 380 pages, and is organized into 10 chapters and one appendix, covering: an introduction to Drupal, installation, modules and blocks, site configuration, user access control, creating content, advanced content, themes, advanced features, site management, and site deployment.

The first chapter serves as an introduction to Drupal, and explains the purpose of CMSs, the advantages of Drupal and other open source software, a brief history of Drupal, what Drupal offers to the site developer, and the many types of sites that can be built. The author discusses the reasons for keeping an unfinished site unavailable to visitors, the purpose of a placeholder page, and the importance of planning the intended site ahead of time. Especially useful to the beginner is the second half of the chapter, which discusses the support information available on the Drupal Web site, such as the well-regarded Handbook in the forums. The chapter concludes with a summary that, like all the others in the book, adds no value and could be cut, to make the book more concise. Newcomers to programming in general, and Drupal in particular, may find this chapter to be quite worthwhile; but experienced Drupal developers can skip it.

To the uninitiated, installing a substantial piece of software and getting it running, is usually the first hurdle, and sometimes the most difficult. Chapter 2 explains how to obtain and install Apache, PHP, and MySQL — in the form of Apache2Triad. This is preceded by a brief overview of the underlying needed technologies, which would be helpful to someone unfamiliar with them. However, the diagram on page 33 could certainly use better labeling of the inner components. Also, on page 47, the reader is instructed to look for the file php.ini in "C:\windows"; that may be the case for users of Apache2Triad, but for everyone else, the PHP configuration file is by default located in the PHP root directory. Nevertheless, the chapter explains not only the (relatively few) steps involved in installing Drupal on a Windows server, but also explains how to troubleshoot some of the more common problems that can be encountered. It concludes with an overview of the administration area, and how to create a simple homepage. The author provides the URL that a reader can use in case they accidentally disable user login (including admin login); but the URL (.../user/login) would only work if the reader succeeded in enabling clean URLs.

The critical topics of modules, blocks, menus, and links, are discussed in the third chapter, titled "Basic Functionality." It covers how to enable and configure modules, and how to find and install third-party modules. Three commonly used modules — Forum, Comments, and Search — are examined in detail, as is a third-party module that implements DHTML menus. They are put to use in constructing the sample Web site used throughout the book for illustrative purposes. The chapter's material is comprehensible, but the discussion of primary and secondary links, at the end, could certainly use clarification.

Chapter 4 is straightforward, and covers the fundamentals of site configuration. The author discusses clean URLs, error reporting, file uploading, system event logging and reports, high-level site information, and site maintenance. The subsequent chapter addresses the powerful functionality within Drupal for allowing site administrators to control user access to content — utilizing roles, permissions, users, registration, and access rules. It is a valuable discussion, marred only by a subpar illustration at the beginning (on page 117), and, at the end, the absence of a clear explanation as to the application of host type access rules.

All of the aforementioned topics would be of little value in a site that had no content, and in Chapters 6 and 7, David Mercer discusses simple and advanced content, respectively. The former chapter covers the various types of content, how to work with them, and how to administer content — with particular emphasis on two of the modules that are most applicable to content: Aggregator and Book. The illustration on page 152 does not include the "language" filter criterion mentioned on the next page. The biggest improvement that could be made to this chapter, would be for the author to more frequently specify how in the Drupal menu system the reader can go to the administrative section under discussion — similar to site breadcrumbs. Currently, the reader has to skip back, sometimes several pages, just to discover the steps needed to go to the specific Drupal section. In the subsequent chapter, the author explores taxonomy, the Content Construction Kit (CCK), and handling content posting using HTML and PHP. But the illustration on page 216 is missing the URL filter; the multi-page summary of HTML should be replaced with a few references to quality online HTML guides; the initial HTML code on page 227 is missing from the screenshot; and the image file path on page 228 should not have the localhost hardcoded.

Chapter 8 discusses Drupal's user interface and themes, at some length — in fact, too much length, as this is some of the book's most long-winded material. The CSS review section could be replaced with a few well-chosen links. It is stated that all five available themes have been enabled in the discussion, and yet that is not reflected in any of the screenshots. The penultimate chapter covers some advanced features — OpenID, actions, triggers, languages, localization, performance, caching, throttling, and JavaScript. Apropos of that last topic, the author several times advises the reader to "reload" a theme in order to implement any change to the .info file, but fails to explain how the reader can do the reload. For resolving this question, the book's index is characteristically unhelpful. The final chapter briefly explores Drupal site backup, task scheduling, and other site maintenance issues. The section on the Path and Pathauto modules should be combined with Chapter 4's section on clean URLs. The appendix explains how to deploy a site, and thus should have been located at the beginning of the last chapter.

Overall, the book accomplishes most of which it sets out to achieve. It provides a generous amount of information about Drupal, and discusses the material at an even pace that should not overwhelm even the most inexperienced programmer. Also, the book is packed with screenshots and other illustrations, so the reader can see the pages where they would make changes, and also see the effects. Nonetheless, readers will get even more out of it if they follow along and make the changes in a sample Drupal installation.

Despite the book's merits, it still has some areas of weakness. They include, as alluded to earlier, the index, which is missing some key topics, such as views and clean URLs, to mention only two.

In various places throughout the book, the writing could be markedly improved. Many of the sentences are awkwardly constructed, and consequently more difficult to understand at first glance. This is especially true in the first chapter, which has more high-level description and less technical detail. In addition, many of the sentences are run on, exacerbated by a lack of commas, which would alert the reader when to pause within the sentences. Dashes are frequently used where semicolons are called for. In some instances, new terms are incorrectly put in title case (e.g. on page 8). The terms "which" and "that" are sometimes interchanged incorrectly, as are "that" instead of "who" (e.g., page 126).

In general, the book is too wordy — on a large scale (chapter summaries, and entire paragraphs, that could be excised), and on a small scale (unneeded phrases here and there, such as "hopefully like contributing meaningfully" on page 34). The discussions, while friendly, could certainly use some tightening up and correction. Readers can do without the imagined musings of a Web server and a Google bot. In the aforesaid article on the Drupal site, the author notes, "...I have cut out quite a bit of the old text and trimmed that which remained..." Further cutting and trimming needs to be done.

Like most programming books nowadays, this one contains numerous errata: "DevelopmentEnvironment" (page i), "openID" (page 3), "Javascript" (ditto), "little to now experience" (page 4),....and many many more.

Some of the phrasing in the book is a bit awkward; for instance: "sell it on as" (page 28), "Meg" (for MB; page 35), "before last again" (page 84), and "remit" (presumably to mean boundaries; pages 116 and 117). There are some inconsistencies, such as on page 4, where, in the same CSS rule, we see both "#FF0000" and "#aaa." There are countless compound adjectives lacking hyphens (too many to catalog here). Finally, there are too many exclamation marks that serve no purpose.

This is the first book I have ever seen — and I hope the last — for which the title is never written in title case, but instead in sentence case. This may be of no consequence on the book's title page, where the nature of the title is obvious. But it becomes quite misleading when incorporated into a regular sentence, such as in the second paragraph on page 2, which causes the reader to initially conclude that the author is talking about the process of "Building powerful and robust websites..." Only later does it become clear that the author is not discussing any such building process, but rather the book itself.

Yet aside from these blemishes, the book does an excellent job of covering all the important topics that would be of interest to beginning and intermediate Drupal programmers. The author clearly has a genuine passion for Drupal, and frequently encourages readers to contribute to the Drupal community and its growing body of knowledge. Building Powerful and Robust Websites With Drupal 6 is a comprehensive, approachable, and valuable guide to making the most of Drupal — easily recommendable.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase Building Powerful and Robust Websites With Drupal 6 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "For creating Web sites, developers are increasingly making use of content management systems (CMSs), any of which can provide the framework for a new site. But just as there are many similarities among all the leading CMSs, there are some significant differences, such as how easy they are to install, administer, and build upon, for creating new sites. If developer loyalty is any measure of the present and future success of a CMS, then Drupal should be considered a standout among other CMSs. For instance, its online documentation alone is often cited as a distinguishing advantage. But most developers would prefer learning Drupal from a book, such as Building Powerful and Robust Websites With Drupal 6, by David Mercer." Keep reading below for the rest of Michael's review. Building Powerful and Robust Websites With Drupal 6 author David Mercer pages 380 publisher Packt Publishing rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 1847192971 summary A comprehensive, readable, and upbeat guide to Drupal 6. This particular book was published on 1 February 2008, under the ISBNs 1847192971 and 978-1847192974. It is one of the latest titles from Packt Publishing, a relatively new technical publishing firm that is nonetheless gaining a reputation for its support of the open source software movement, including open source CMSs such as Drupal and Joomla. The firm's "about us" page notes that, with the purchase of every book that covers an open source technology, they pay a royalty to that open source project. A recent article on the Drupal Web site states that the company has raised more than $100,000 through these open source royalties.

In his book's "About the Author" section, David Mercer mentions that this title is a follow-up to a first edition of the book, even though the publication information that follows the title page, mentions nothing about this being a second edition. Most likely he is referring to his 2006 book titled Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites, which covered Drupal version 4.7.

The publisher makes available a Web page devoted to the book, where readers can download the sample code, submit feedback, post a question about the book, read an online excerpt, and obtain a sample chapter, on "Advanced Content," as a PDF file. Readers can also purchase the electronic version of the book, which contains everything found in the print version. For any programmer who plans on developing Drupal sites on a laptop, while away from their home or office technical library, the e-book version could prove especially valuable and convenient.

Building Powerful and Robust Websites With Drupal 6 aims to cover all the major aspects of using Drupal, and is targeted at Drupal beginners, though the author does state in the preface that the book's broad coverage may be helpful to intermediate users. The information spans 380 pages, and is organized into 10 chapters and one appendix, covering: an introduction to Drupal, installation, modules and blocks, site configuration, user access control, creating content, advanced content, themes, advanced features, site management, and site deployment.

The first chapter serves as an introduction to Drupal, and explains the purpose of CMSs, the advantages of Drupal and other open source software, a brief history of Drupal, what Drupal offers to the site developer, and the many types of sites that can be built. The author discusses the reasons for keeping an unfinished site unavailable to visitors, the purpose of a placeholder page, and the importance of planning the intended site ahead of time. Especially useful to the beginner is the second half of the chapter, which discusses the support information available on the Drupal Web site, such as the well-regarded Handbook in the forums. The chapter concludes with a summary that, like all the others in the book, adds no value and could be cut, to make the book more concise. Newcomers to programming in general, and Drupal in particular, may find this chapter to be quite worthwhile; but experienced Drupal developers can skip it.

To the uninitiated, installing a substantial piece of software and getting it running, is usually the first hurdle, and sometimes the most difficult. Chapter 2 explains how to obtain and install Apache, PHP, and MySQL — in the form of Apache2Triad. This is preceded by a brief overview of the underlying needed technologies, which would be helpful to someone unfamiliar with them. However, the diagram on page 33 could certainly use better labeling of the inner components. Also, on page 47, the reader is instructed to look for the file php.ini in "C:\windows"; that may be the case for users of Apache2Triad, but for everyone else, the PHP configuration file is by default located in the PHP root directory. Nevertheless, the chapter explains not only the (relatively few) steps involved in installing Drupal on a Windows server, but also explains how to troubleshoot some of the more common problems that can be encountered. It concludes with an overview of the administration area, and how to create a simple homepage. The author provides the URL that a reader can use in case they accidentally disable user login (including admin login); but the URL (.../user/login) would only work if the reader succeeded in enabling clean URLs.

The critical topics of modules, blocks, menus, and links, are discussed in the third chapter, titled "Basic Functionality." It covers how to enable and configure modules, and how to find and install third-party modules. Three commonly used modules — Forum, Comments, and Search — are examined in detail, as is a third-party module that implements DHTML menus. They are put to use in constructing the sample Web site used throughout the book for illustrative purposes. The chapter's material is comprehensible, but the discussion of primary and secondary links, at the end, could certainly use clarification.

Chapter 4 is straightforward, and covers the fundamentals of site configuration. The author discusses clean URLs, error reporting, file uploading, system event logging and reports, high-level site information, and site maintenance. The subsequent chapter addresses the powerful functionality within Drupal for allowing site administrators to control user access to content — utilizing roles, permissions, users, registration, and access rules. It is a valuable discussion, marred only by a subpar illustration at the beginning (on page 117), and, at the end, the absence of a clear explanation as to the application of host type access rules.

All of the aforementioned topics would be of little value in a site that had no content, and in Chapters 6 and 7, David Mercer discusses simple and advanced content, respectively. The former chapter covers the various types of content, how to work with them, and how to administer content — with particular emphasis on two of the modules that are most applicable to content: Aggregator and Book. The illustration on page 152 does not include the "language" filter criterion mentioned on the next page. The biggest improvement that could be made to this chapter, would be for the author to more frequently specify how in the Drupal menu system the reader can go to the administrative section under discussion — similar to site breadcrumbs. Currently, the reader has to skip back, sometimes several pages, just to discover the steps needed to go to the specific Drupal section. In the subsequent chapter, the author explores taxonomy, the Content Construction Kit (CCK), and handling content posting using HTML and PHP. But the illustration on page 216 is missing the URL filter; the multi-page summary of HTML should be replaced with a few references to quality online HTML guides; the initial HTML code on page 227 is missing from the screenshot; and the image file path on page 228 should not have the localhost hardcoded.

Chapter 8 discusses Drupal's user interface and themes, at some length — in fact, too much length, as this is some of the book's most long-winded material. The CSS review section could be replaced with a few well-chosen links. It is stated that all five available themes have been enabled in the discussion, and yet that is not reflected in any of the screenshots. The penultimate chapter covers some advanced features — OpenID, actions, triggers, languages, localization, performance, caching, throttling, and JavaScript. Apropos of that last topic, the author several times advises the reader to "reload" a theme in order to implement any change to the .info file, but fails to explain how the reader can do the reload. For resolving this question, the book's index is characteristically unhelpful. The final chapter briefly explores Drupal site backup, task scheduling, and other site maintenance issues. The section on the Path and Pathauto modules should be combined with Chapter 4's section on clean URLs. The appendix explains how to deploy a site, and thus should have been located at the beginning of the last chapter.

Overall, the book accomplishes most of which it sets out to achieve. It provides a generous amount of information about Drupal, and discusses the material at an even pace that should not overwhelm even the most inexperienced programmer. Also, the book is packed with screenshots and other illustrations, so the reader can see the pages where they would make changes, and also see the effects. Nonetheless, readers will get even more out of it if they follow along and make the changes in a sample Drupal installation.

Despite the book's merits, it still has some areas of weakness. They include, as alluded to earlier, the index, which is missing some key topics, such as views and clean URLs, to mention only two.

In various places throughout the book, the writing could be markedly improved. Many of the sentences are awkwardly constructed, and consequently more difficult to understand at first glance. This is especially true in the first chapter, which has more high-level description and less technical detail. In addition, many of the sentences are run on, exacerbated by a lack of commas, which would alert the reader when to pause within the sentences. Dashes are frequently used where semicolons are called for. In some instances, new terms are incorrectly put in title case (e.g. on page 8). The terms "which" and "that" are sometimes interchanged incorrectly, as are "that" instead of "who" (e.g., page 126).

In general, the book is too wordy — on a large scale (chapter summaries, and entire paragraphs, that could be excised), and on a small scale (unneeded phrases here and there, such as "hopefully like contributing meaningfully" on page 34). The discussions, while friendly, could certainly use some tightening up and correction. Readers can do without the imagined musings of a Web server and a Google bot. In the aforesaid article on the Drupal site, the author notes, "...I have cut out quite a bit of the old text and trimmed that which remained..." Further cutting and trimming needs to be done.

Like most programming books nowadays, this one contains numerous errata: "DevelopmentEnvironment" (page i), "openID" (page 3), "Javascript" (ditto), "little to now experience" (page 4),....and many many more.

Some of the phrasing in the book is a bit awkward; for instance: "sell it on as" (page 28), "Meg" (for MB; page 35), "before last again" (page 84), and "remit" (presumably to mean boundaries; pages 116 and 117). There are some inconsistencies, such as on page 4, where, in the same CSS rule, we see both "#FF0000" and "#aaa." There are countless compound adjectives lacking hyphens (too many to catalog here). Finally, there are too many exclamation marks that serve no purpose.

This is the first book I have ever seen — and I hope the last — for which the title is never written in title case, but instead in sentence case. This may be of no consequence on the book's title page, where the nature of the title is obvious. But it becomes quite misleading when incorporated into a regular sentence, such as in the second paragraph on page 2, which causes the reader to initially conclude that the author is talking about the process of "Building powerful and robust websites..." Only later does it become clear that the author is not discussing any such building process, but rather the book itself.

Yet aside from these blemishes, the book does an excellent job of covering all the important topics that would be of interest to beginning and intermediate Drupal programmers. The author clearly has a genuine passion for Drupal, and frequently encourages readers to contribute to the Drupal community and its growing body of knowledge. Building Powerful and Robust Websites With Drupal 6 is a comprehensive, approachable, and valuable guide to making the most of Drupal — easily recommendable.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase Building Powerful and Robust Websites With Drupal 6 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Web developers familiar with a particular programming language, such as PHP, typically turn to books and forums for assistance only when they confront a specific problem that they believe has probably been encountered by many of their peers in the past, and who have published their answers in print or online. Hence the growing popularity of programming "cookbooks", which eschew flowing narratives in favor of self-contained problem descriptions and solutions. One example of a book that combines both styles is Wicked Cool PHP: Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems, by William Steinmetz with Brian Ward." Keep reading below for the rest of Michael's review. Wicked Cool PHP: Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems author William Steinmetz with Brian Ward pages 224 publisher No Starch Press rating 5/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1593271732 summary Yet another PHP book that presents a variety of topics through sample code. Published by No Starch Press on 9 February 2008, under the ISBNs 1593271735 and 978-1593271732, Wicked Cool PHP aims to provide the reader with a wide-ranging collection of complete PHP scripts and code fragments that solve specific problems frequently encountered by PHP coders. It is not intended for explaining the fundamentals of PHP, but assumes that the reader already understands the basics of the language. The book covers PHP versions 5 and 6. On the book's Web page, visitors can purchase it online, download a sample chapter (Chapter 4: Working with Forms), and download most of the sample code.

The book's material is organized into a dozen chapters, covering a range of topic areas: some simple scripts; configuring PHP; PHP security; forms; text and HTML; dates; files; user and session tracking; e-mail; images; using cURL to interact with Web services; and three intermediate projects. A brief appendix shows the MySQL commands for creating the product_info table used in many of the book's scripts. The book's back cover claims that it offers 76 scripts, but at least one section (#69) does not contain a script.

The first chapter is titled "The FAQs of Life — The Scripts Every PHP Programmer Wants (or Needs) to Know." That's quite a claim, unfulfilled by the chapter's material, which covers only seven narrow topics, such as how to include another file in a script (require_once) and how to print an array (print_r). Furthermore, there is no common theme for the scripts chosen, aside from their addressing questions that one of the authors — who is not identified — sees repeatedly in PHP forums and discussion groups. Some are extremely basic (e.g., print_r), while others address topics that are far more advanced and deserving lengthier treatment (e.g. templating your site with Smarty). That last topic would have been much better presented as an intermediate project in the book's final chapter.

Configuring PHP is an area that can prove perilous for programmers who are new to the language, and are, for whatever reason, having difficulty setting up PHP on their home Web server. For such individuals, Chapter 2 should prove quite useful, because it offers a clear overview of how they can configure their own PHP installations to match their needs. Some of the configuration advice could be a lifesaver, depending upon the reader's circumstances — such as the information on using open_basedir to limit directory access to PHP (and energetic hackers).

However, on page 20, when the authors provide advice on how the reader can find the php.ini file, they suggest that Windows users should look in "C:\php." Actually, the default installation file path is "C:\Program Files\PHP" (unless the reader has altered the value of ProgramFilesDir in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion key in their Windows Registry). They urge the reader to delete any phpinfo() script, for security reasons. But having such a script on a remote server could be quite valuable to the reader, at some point in the future; so it would be wiser to simply rename it, assuming that the reader has not allowed hackers to list file names on his or her Web server.

Several times in the book the authors advise the reader to set the error_reporting configuration option off for production servers — as well as for development servers lacking firewalls — so hackers and others do not see system information contained in error messages. But error_reporting is best used for specifying the level of error reporting, while the display_errors configuration option is best used for disabling the display of those errors to the site visitor. Errors should still be recorded in the Apache error log, so the developer can better diagnose what happened on a production site.

As with most first editions, this one contains several errata: "phpinfo()can" (page 21), "data to encrypted" (page 42), "six years" (page 55; should be 10 years, to match the code), and "timestamp() function" (page 82; should be "time() function").

In any book, a sizable number of minor flaws will prompt the careful reader to begin questioning the editing of the book. This is especially true when encountered in the first paragraph of the first page of the Introduction: "stumbled on to," which should instead be two words. But it goes beyond just issues of line editing — to a question of judgment. That very first page also contains "After you calm down," which is too flippant for what should be a professional work, as are other instances: "living hell" (page 4), "hash-ish" (page 40), and "Mac users... [like] to buy expensive gadgets for the sole purpose of looking stylish" (page 113). The authors frequently use the term "I" without specifying which author is being referred to; presumably it is the first author listed. On page 64, they state that they had previously mentioned the === operator, but I cannot find it anywhere, and neither could whoever created the book's index.

In the sample code, the authors use double quotation marks — instead of single ones — for most of the strings, few of which contain variables. This slows down the PHP interpreter by forcing it to check for variables within the strings, to be interpolated. Moreover, they are not consistent in the usage — occasionally switching over to single quotes instead, for no apparent reason. The same is true of in-line comments, which switch back and forth between Java and C styles.

The code in general is not entirely consistent throughout the book, e.g., using print() in most cases, but echo() in the remaining ones, with no explanation as to why. Perhaps this is the result of having two authors. Most HTML tag names are in lowercase, but a couple are in uppercase.

Some of the book's code appears invalid. For instance, on page 5, one of the statements (abbreviated here), echo "$row[product_name]," generates two errors: "unexpected T_ENCAPSED_AND_WHITESPACE" and "Use of undefined constant key — assumed 'product_name'." The correct code would be: echo "{$row[ 'product_name' ]}." On page 41, $cipher is set to the string "MCRYPT_SERPENT_256," which generates an error, and probably instead should be set to the constant MCRYPT_SERPENT, which works fine. $mode is set to the string "MCRYPT_MODE_CBC," but that should be a constant as well. On page 72, the regex pattern for matching HTML anchor tags does not match an entire opening tag, but just a portion of it. In the downloadable code for section #68, getpage.php fails because "<?" should be "<?php." Readers shouldn't have to debug a book's code just to get it to run without error. Did no one test the sample code before publication?! In the code for section #71, mapdemo.php generates index errors when run without any GET parameters, and does not generate a map when values are entered in the form.

Some of the code may work in certain circumstances, but not in others. For example, on page 70, the pipe character (|) is recommended as a substitute for the forward slash (/) for regex patterns containing many such slashes. But the pipe character is a very poor choice, because it has a special meaning in regex patterns, namely, as the 'or' operator, and thus cannot be used for any pattern that needs to use that operator. In section #49, calculate_time_difference() fails if one or both of the timestamps is the epoch time (time zero). In section #61, get_ip() assumes that two $_SERVER keys are set, and fails when they are not.

Some of the code works but can give beginners the wrong impression. For instance, on page 25, the authors present a configuration setting (incorrectly referred to as an "extension"): ini_set(max_execution_time, "240"). But max_execution_time is not placed in quotation marks. Even though this does not cause an error, a newbie may do the same with ini_get(), and become confused as to why PHP then (rightly) complains. (One could argue that PHP should also flag the ini_set() call as erroneous.) Section #50 could mislead newbie programmers into using that multi-line script instead of PHP's file_get_contents(). Section #51 similarly re-creates the wheel, namely, file_put_contents().

Lastly, some of the code, comments, and variable naming choices are quite puzzling. For instance, in section #30, validate_cc_number defines a variable as $false = false, but this "variable" never gets changed in the rest of the script. That is what constants are for. In the downloadable time difference scripts for Chapter 6, we find "print abs(5 — 62);" with no apparent purpose. In timediff.php, calculate_time_difference() checks for divide by zero errors for a variable that is never used as a denominator.

Unlike most computer programming books, this one has no acknowledgments of any technical reviewers. Given all of the problems in the code, it is possible that there actually were no technical reviewers, though it is difficult to imagine any reason why a publisher would choose that unwise route.

In terms of formatting of the material in the book, most of the left-hand pages (the even-numbered ones) have the page contents shifted too far to the right, almost running into the crease of the book, and leaving a glaring amount of wasted whitespace in the left-hand margin. The only exceptions are on pages 163, 164, and 172, where portions of code awkwardly jut out into the left margin.

The downloadable code archive is quite flawed, and a fair amount of the code needs to be cleaned up. For example, getpage.php contains a lot of redundant code. Much of the sample code in the book is not included in the archive; incredibly, this includes some of the largest scripts, such as the Smarty code in Chapter 1 and the credit card processing code in Chapter 4. In fact, the archive is missing the code for two entire chapters (2 and 3). Oddly enough, at least a couple scripts in the archive are not mentioned in the book. The archive needs a complete overhaul, including the cleanup or elimination of seemingly leftover scripts such as foo.php (three instances) and captcha_old.php.

On the positive side of the ledger, the book contains information that would be of interest to all levels of PHP programmers. For instance, readers who are just barely familiar with the language will benefit from the discussions concerning superglobals, form input security, date and file manipulation, and how to save user information with sessions and cookies. More advanced developers may profit from the discussions on encryption, PHPMailer, captchas, Web services, and other topics generally found later in the book.

In addition, many of the sections include a special subsection titled "What Can Go Wrong?," in which the authors consider potential problems with the code or overall approach presented in that section. Undoubtedly other technical books provide such information, interwoven with the main narrative; but explicitly identifying potential pitfalls is a worthy practice — one that we can only hope to see in other programming books in the future.

At 224 pages, it is a relatively slim volume, but contains a fair amount of useful information relative to its size — a pithiness welcome in the world of computer books. (Fortunately, the trend in the technical publishing world has shifted away from tomes sometimes exceeding 1000 pages that are padded with poorly-edited material shoveled in by multiple authors.)

Yet all in all, Wicked Cool PHP is largely disappointing. It contains no PHP scripts that could be considered "wicked cool." Moreover, the aforementioned code problems clearly call for an improved second edition, including a complete revision of the downloadable code archive. On the other hand, Wicked Cool PHP touches upon a number of key topics in PHP programming, with minimal fluff, and gets right to the point.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.

You can purchase Wicked Cool PHP: Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.