Joomla! 1.5 Development Cookbook

Written by Phil Snell Friday, 08 January 2010 11:57

If you're a Web Developer interested in developing extensions for Joomla!, there's a great new book by James Kennard called Joomla! 1.5 Development Cookbook.   It's published by Packt Publishing, which is an excellent resource for Joomla! books.  This book is aimed at experienced PHP developers, who have some knowledge about Joomla!.  It doesn't try to explain all about how Joomla! works, it assumes you know that fairly well.  What is does is provide many real world, practical solutions that you will be able to use on a regular basis when developing for Joomla!.

As the title suggests, the book is organized into 'recipes' , which are short tutorials on a specific topic.  This makes is possible to flip to any page in the book, and find a solution you need.  If there are related topics, they will be listed there so that you can find background information if needed.   Some examples of recipes you will find are "Writing SQL-safe LIKE strong comparison queries", "Creating a JTable", "Filtering tabular data in an MVC component", etc.. With each of these recipes offering a focused, and concise description of the problem, and code examples for how to develop the solution.

For a beginner developer, this book may be too dense and overwhelming, because it provides just the facts of each topic, without the background.  So there would be other books you should read first, or make sure you are familiar with PHP, and web development concepts.  If you're an experienced PHP developer just starting out with Joomla!, this book will really help jump start your learning.  You'll be able to find the solution to common development tasks in clear examples, and also will be learning the practical applications of the Joomla! framework.  For experienced Joomla! developers, you will still most likely find something new in this book, and helps to understand best practices.

What I like most about this book is the straightforward style of the examples, and the emphasis on real world uses.  So you won't just learn how to do something, you'll learn how to do something securely, and efficiently.  The emphasis on security is what I have found the most helpful for my development.  Web security is a very tough problem, and it's so important to keep it in mind throughout development.  In this book, security is kept front and centre,  along with efficient use of the Joomla! framework and API.

Note: I'm a member of the Packt affiliate program. I'm providing disclosure of this fact, so that my readers can make informed decisions.

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