[Packt] MODx book released today!

I think that they are making a mistake in not posting the community members who did the tech review. That might increase the book’s credibility. I know that a few weathered community members did technical reviews of the book.

Also a TOC will be very nice...

Quote from: charliez at Mar 27, 2009, 02:20 PM

Also a TOC will be very nice...

There is a TOC

http://www.packtpub.com/article/modx-web-development-table-of-contents

Interesting Table of Contents. I’ve been told to expect my copy early April but will post when it arrives.

Quote from: dev_cw at Mar 27, 2009, 12:26 PM

Quote from: BobRay at Mar 27, 2009, 12:12 PM

It will certainly be available before my MODx book is out.

I thought your book was on Revolution.

The current plan for my book is to base it on Revolution, but have a section at the end of each chapter explaining the chapter to Evolution users. Except for the new features in Revo, the change in the tags, and a somewhat redesigned Manager interface, the same concepts apply (documents, snippets, chunks, templates, and TVs still have the same jobs).

I received an email this morning with download instructions for the new MoDx ebook. Printed copy to follow

I bought the new MODx Web Development book last week and I’ve just finished reading it - to be honest, and I’m going to be blunt, I have been quite disappointed, 4/10.

I’m totally aware that the founders and the core team have had little to do with the book, I noticed Shane Sponagle and Susan Ottwell from these forums were the books Reviewers, what involvement did you guys have?

One of the main thing that surprised me is that the author, Antano Solar John doesn’t use these forums or participate in the MODx Community and his personal webpage doesn’t mention MODx at all and is run using WordPress If I’d been picked up by a publisher to write the first MODx book my blog would be filled with stuff related to my book, Antano doesn’t even have anything in the Repository; that whole side of things just seems very odd to me - one of the most important things about MODx to me is the community, which you just don’t get with a closed source product; in my opinion he should have stressed that more in the book, as its an important thing for newcomers to know about MODx.

A few nitpicks are that in some places MODx is referred to as ’mod x’ and also the book refers to examples coming later when they are actually earlier in the book, e.g. "Use of this will be explained in the next subsection", when in fact it was explained in the previous section - also another tiny thing is in some of the Snippet calls he uses &tpl=`blah` and in other places he uses &tpl=`blah`, or [wayfinder!] instead of [!wayfinder!] - and he formats his CSS all in one line for some examples and then each element on a new line in others...

I also found slightly annoying the fact that in most examples the entire page’s HTML is dumped into the book (some marked up in tables), and then when the tutorial moves on to the next step the whole page’s HTML is dumped into the book again but with some minor adjustments, including <DOCTYPE>, <head>, <body>, etc, when nothing has changed in those areas (See the PHx chapter) - I dunno, it just seemed a waste of space dumping all that code again just to show the next step in the tutorial.

Personally I wasn’t expecting a great deal from the book as I’ve been using MODx for a while, but I did notice the juicy bits like Chapter 11: Creating Snippets got 14 pages (also covering the MODx API) and the basic Chapter 4: Tempting got 30 pages.

In some places it feels like he’s copy-pasted the Wiki and then fluffed it out with tables, screenshots and chapter summaries - he’s not gone into any depth with techniques or how to use TVs or Chunks in clever ways; which you soon learn how to do after a couple of months of using MODx...

Overall the book is presented as something for advanced users, whereas it goes into a lot of depth about the basics (even what a CMS is and what the pros and cons are of using them), I reckon that some people out there looking to move away from ExpressionEngine, Joomla or WordPress will be put off by this and perhaps disappointed.

I dunno, maybe I’m totally missing the point here and I’m ranting about nothing.

I have read the book too. Quick review:

Positive:

• Good offline reference
• Probably very useful guide for beginners
• Clear and simple chapter structure

Negative:

• Unpolished - code examples, screenshots and language overall would need more consistency
• Offers very little for advanced users - for me the only new thing in the whole book was SMF integration with MODx
• No deep MODx knowledge/tips - apparently the author is not a MODx professional

I’ll give it 7/10.

I’m totally aware that the founders and the core team have had little to do with the book, I noticed Shane Sponagle and Susan Ottwell from these forums were the books Reviewers, what involvement did you guys have?

I was actually only a technical reviewer limiting my observations to MODx related stuff (I was surprised to hear about my credit as a reviewer, I was expecting technical reviewer), I had no control over the content, approach or structure of the book. Having not received my copy of the book yet so I have not seen the final outcome, but I think that it is a good entry-level book for learning MODx as well as off-line resource. I hope we have an opportunity to do an advanced book as a follow up

To be fair, Packt did a great job of trying to get an active MODx community member to write the book. Making that type of commitment of time is not trivial, and at some point they have to push forward with getting a book published. The reviewer role was to review for technical accuracy, not formatting or stylistic issues.

I’m tremendously grateful for Packt’s work on this effort. I don’t think the intended target of the book is advanced users, but as a more basic overview of MODx in general intended more for those less experienced with or new to MODx.