Joomla! 1.5 Top Extensions Cookbook

As said some weeks ago, we have received a copy of book Joomla! 1.5 Top Extensions Cookbook from Packt Publishing.

This is our review.

Subject

The book presents a lot of Joomla! 1.5 extensions, divided by requirement typology (for example multimedia management, admistration panel improvements, and so on).

There’s a brief explanation about every extension that shows where you can download it, how to install  and which are the basic configurations.

Readers

The book is recommended for every Joomla sites admin: everyone who can install extension can benefit from knowing a  great number, tested and reviewed by experts.

The incredible number of extensions available for Joomla offers a great choice, but can also create the problem of choosing the most reliable: this book selection aims to solve it.

Impressions

As said, the author takes the trouble to discover, install and test a lot of extensions and this alone makes this book useful. Space for every extension is necessarily restricted, but going deep quickly in basic configuration options is an helpful idea.

Anyway, there’s always some flaw. 🙂

The author says that every extension is the most popular of its kind, but caution to this statement. The extensions described in the book are a selection based on personal opinions. No scientific methodology supports this statement: just saying that these are the most downloaded extensions, without giving some numbers and/or a data source for this numbers, is not enough.

Particularly, there’s a lack of extensions that we consider essential, while there are some others unknown, or not good enough to be included ina “Top Extensions” list.

Another little flaw: some screenshots seem to be approximate, especially when they include additional notes and highlightings by the author.

Finally, we can comprehend the reason for giving to every chapter a title related to the problem it solves, but we think that it would have been better to include also an additional index based on extensions names.

Conclusions

As long as it’s clear that this is a personal and not exhaustive selection, this book could be really helpful.

If you read it first from start to finish, and then you keep it at hand to help you in specific cases, you can quickly improve your Joomla site, both including new functionalities and improving existing ones.

Go to the Packt Publishing site if you want to buy this book.