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Mastering Mambo: E-Commerce, Templates, Module Development, SEO, Security, and Performance Review by Chet Lee
Good Beginning book, but def not advanced.
I bought Mastering Mamo because I believed it would be for an advanced or more seasoned user seeing that there was already a "Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial Building Websites With Mambo" by the same publisher. The book is geared more towards work (document management, e-commerce) based as opposed to personal sites.
For a book published Dec 2005, I found it to be a little dated although not enough to be an issue. I also found several typos.
In my opinion, this book is very good for a person who has installed mambo/joomla, and is trying to understand how the ideas behind how the CMS works. This book is great for accellerating the learning curve of how Components, Modules, and Bots interplay... What positions are and how they work... And overall how to start extending the default install.
About half the book is nice overviews of 3rd party extensions. I think that is the best part of the book. It's nice to have them but I wouldn't buy the book for it.
The sections on security and Search Engine Optimization, and performance tuning are good for begining web/cms developers, but readers already familiar with the basics (applicable to all web apps) are not going to get a whole lot. There isn't much that is "Mambo/Joomla" specific.
Overall I'd say that it's a good book that I would recommend to a mambo/joomla beginner intent on building service style sites.
I give this book 3 stars because it is a good book, but despite what it says, that it is for "anyone who has developed a mambo site"... anyone who HAS developed already knows how the core components works, already knows how to search for, find, and install Comp, Mods, Bots... at least. So half the book is useless, the other half is 3PD extensions which can be found and on the web.
Again, good for noobs who are trying to figure out what all the admin pages, fields and parameters are for but if you're already comfortable in the backend... move on.