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Well, once again I was asked some time ago to review one of their publications, this time, Learning Mambo, and as always I am scrabbling around for little fragments of time to do all the extra things I need to do on a day to day basis and brush over it. However fragment found here it is, thanks to the guys at Packt for their patience. When I first looked at this book, and it was a bit of a glance, I thought to myself, why do I want to review a book about Mambo, we are all on Joomla right ? So I thought I'd swing on over to Mamboserver.com and see what they are up to, see if they still have a following after the difficult run they have had with Joomla and a number of other iterative forks that have appeared based on the little CMS. But guess what,.....turns out they still have a following, and I get the impression there is a little more activity round Mambo, some of the 3PD's are now linking in and launching Mambo and Joomla variations. Anyway enough rambling, Learning Mambo 
This book opens well, the author, Douglas Paterson, who would appear to have a thing for Golf (no crime there , you'll see what I mean when you read the book) introduces by providing an executive summary and pointing out that there are some download samples to help you on your way ( I did ofcourse download them, always good to make sure the links work :) , happy to report they do, it contains example code for a template and a few other things, the example template is quite useful for people who want to understand how templates work, marry that up with chapter 11, Customizing a template, probably one of the most useful chapters to Mambo users, and for that matter to any of the forks based on Mambo. I'll tell you what I like about this book, it is not written by purist, it is written by a realist, there is no.... you must start from scratch to create a template. The book tells us to 'take a copy of the water and stone template' ...... 'we'll change it as we go', now that is telling it as it is, leading the user down the path of least resistance, making things easier, which is after all, what Mambo is all about, making it easier to build an online presence, without understanding the detail. Another aspect I like about the book is chapter 12, Deploying and Running Your Site. This is all based around the premise that you can build your website locally, and deploy it to your remote server when you are ready. It draws through the steps of how to achieve this with the minimum of effort and risk, and I'm willing to bet, will be very very useful for a large proportion of the community looking to migrate local solutions. Ofcourse, the principle behind it could be applied to a remote to remote migration with a little effort on the part of the reader. A point to note, however, is that this book is not so much a reference as a ground up , this is how you do Mambo, this is what it is, and how you set it up, configure it and change its appearance, it touches on extensions in Chapter 10, but only touches. If you are looking for a book to reveal the inner workings of the CMS or you are a developer looking for a lead into the core, you won;t find it here. This book is what it says it is , all about Learning Mambo from a users perspective. In general, its a good read, useful to many, but equally, not meant for the advanced user. So if this fits your profile, get yourself over there and grab a copy. |
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