Recently I noticed that Packt publishing released two new Magento books covering the 1.4 version.
One aimed at developers: Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook by Nurul Ferdous and the other, most useful to Magento novices and designers: Magento 1.4 Themes Design by Richard Carter.
Coincidently, a Packt Marketing Research Executive approached me with the offer to review both books and publish our opinion on Magebase. We are quire busy these days with project work but we’ll get into the books one by one, starting with the Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook.
Here is what the book page say about this book:
Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook provides unparalleled guidelines to develop a much faster and more captivating Magento store by writing powerful custom modules. The book covers everything from common development tasks to integrating social networking plugins into Magento.
It is structured in the form of recipes covering a range of development topics such as:
- Writing custom modules and widgets
- Creating custom database connection to execute direct database queries
- Write unit tests
- Optimize the site performance
The target audience:
If you are a PHP developer or a software engineer, novice or experienced, interested in achieving high impact in a fast-paced development environment and want to boost your PHP/Magento development skills to the next level then this book is for you.
No prior experience with Magento is required but basic knowledge of PHP is needed.
We are looking forward to reading and reviewing it over the next few weeks. We’ll keep you posted.
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Well, the Development Cookbook isn’t perfect. It has bad examples of code, for example, declaring a new entity right in a template, 1.3-an-older style of defining modules etc.