The Definitive Guide To Magento... really? Unless you're the kind of person that in general has a hard time using computers, about 60% of this book is a complete waste of time in my opinion. Even if you only have maybe a year of web design/development experience, just follow the download instructions online (which is basically download and run and localhost... not hard), and poke around the magento admin area yourself.



The book has an obsession with providing examples to connect to magento via xml and soap toward the end (which most people wont need to do with magento at all but at least it's more definitive like of a topic), but that's about the only thing worth mentioning that a developer would be interested in. Designing custom themes, apps, extensions, ecommerce modules, shipping modules, etc.etc... MIA or skimmed in a few pages. If the book was titled Getting Started with Using Magento Admin... i'd say the book did a good job... but I also wouldn't have bought it.



summary: if you're an absolute beginner with magento, have a hard time using computers in general, and really just want to know how to use magento once everything has been setup for you... this is a good book. If you're a web developer deploying your first magento ecommerce store... there's no depth or information in this book worthy of the price tag so I wouldn't recommend it. If you're a veteran and have created a magento ecommerce store in the past... don't even think about this book.