In all fairness, it does get the job done. The purpose (as I understand it) is primarily to instruct a site administrator or builder who just wants to learn the basics of the administrative interface, with a secondary aim of teaching how to modify a template. However, to analogize a trip from New York to Miami, you aren’t going to take a nonstop flight or even I-95; you’re going to drive down two-lane state roads, get lost, backtrack, eat lunch in Scranton, and visit the Atlanta Aquarium.

The book is just stuffed with meaningless fluff. First, at least half the book is taken up by totally unnecessary screen shots. Secondly, a good 30% of the sentences are either the tenth repetition of a simple concept or utterly meaningless.

At random, my finger picked p.110:

“What Menu Items Do

In a Joomla site, menu items do a lot! [comment -- total waste of ink] In a Joomla site, [comment -- failed high school English?] all pages are generated dynamically. [comment -- umpteenth time this has been stated] Joomla uses information from whatever link a site visitor just clicked to decide what the web page will contain and look like when the user gets there. [comment -- again, as of page 110, this has been stated repeatedly]

You can think of a menu link as having three facets:

- What content the link displays (selection criteria for articles)

- What the generated page looks like (how articles are organized in the page layout)

- Which template is selected to control the page’s style and appearance

- How the menu link’s appearance is controlled.

[comment - also failed 3d grade math]

The links on a menu are controlled by the menu items in that menu [comment - eyes rolling back in my head] (here the Main Menu) in the Menu Manager. This determines what pages they go to and the appearance of those pages. [comment -- didn't you JUST SAY THAT?]”

Well, despite my sarcasm, the book does have the benefit of actually leading you by the hand so that you can grasp the basics of the Byzantine structure of Joomla. You may travel New York to Miami via Scranton and Memphis, but you do end up in Miami. Hence, three stars for basic competency. If you have tried to read any of the online documentation, you will recognize that any rational explanation of Joomla is a godsend; most of the explanations I have read start the New York-Miami trip in Boston and end up somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.

If you want to administer or build a site using standard Joomla 1.5 templates, you will be able to do so after reading the book. It begins to get inadequate when it comes to making changes. In some spots it teaches elementary PHP and CSS that you had damned well better already know if you’re going to start fiddling with components/modules/templates/extensions. At other spots, it fails to explain more abstruse aspects of the system adequately. In fairness, however, there are some useful bits hidden in the latter part of the book.

If I knew of a decent book (or online source) covering the two primary subjects considered in “Joomla! 1.5 . . .” I’d give it two stars. It really is horribly disorganized and replete with repetition and padding. But there aren’t. It muddles to a bit of success where others fail completely.
Rating: 3 / 5

The book is easy to read and uses a tutorial approach in later chapters of the book that walks you through creating various types of website. I was especially interested in the Pure CSS website, as I had installed previous versions of Joomla, but removed them because I didn’t want a website that uses HTML tables for layout.

The other types of website that are covered in the book, or should I say tutorial are:

A School Website.

A Restaurant Website.

A blog site.

Components, modules and plugins are explained and covered in enough detail for those starting out on the Joomla path.

WHY DIDN’T I GIVE THE BOOK 5 STARS?

Now for the parts of the book that prevented me from awarding the 5 stars, that the content of the book deserves.

Mr North has a section within his book about how to get traffic to your website. The information is a very worthwhile edition to the book and covers several Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Rank Positioning (SERP) techniques. Link Building, Referals, Pay Per Click and other methods of getting traffic to your website are also covered.

However, despite the quality of the information I can’t help thinking that this section was only created for Mr Barrie M. North to push his affiliate marketing links.

For the uninitiated among you affiliate marketing is where companies will pay you a commission for any sales that are the result of people following your affiliate link and buying from their website.

Even Amazon has an affiliate / associate program:

http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join

For example Wordtracker (one of the recommended keyword reseach tools) has an affiliate program that pays a 5% commission on all sales, resulting from an affiliates link. A yearly subscription at wordtracker is $329, therefore Mr North gets a nice $16.45 paid into his affiliate account if you buy from his affiliate link.

This is just one of the affiliate links within this book, others are for PR Prowler and Perry Marshalls – Definitive Guide to Google Adwords website.

The web addresses (URL) given in the book are not the actual URL of the websites.

Lets take an example:

I join the affiliate program of:

1. http://www.xyz.com

2. They give me an affiliate ID of http://www.xyz.com/something

3. I register the domain name http://www.xyzisgreat.com

4. I then use my registrar’s (person I registered my domain name with) Domain Control Panel to forward and links that go to http://www.xyzisgreat.com to my affiliate link

5. You use my website address http://www.xyzisgreat.com visit the website my affiliate link point to and purchase a product.

6. I rub my hands with glee as all the money comes rolling in.

I expect to find affiliate links in ebooks that are given away free on a website, you get quality information and the author gets a bit of payback if you follow his affiliate links and purchase something he has recommended to you.

I do not expect to have affiliate link within a book that I have paid good money for. I have the Perry Marshall book and have used Wordtracker in the past, so I know what good resources they are.

However I have never heard of or used PR Prowler (A program that Mr North pushes heavily in his book, in fact he mentions how great the program is numerous times). How can an take this as an unbiased recommendation from a knowledgable Internet Marketing Guru, if I know that the link has only been put in the book for Mr North to get a commission if I buy?

To summarize:

Great book filled with excellent information about everything you need to know about creating your first website with Joomla. Just a shame that Mr North had to fill the SEO Chapter of the book with recommendations that he gets paid for if you buy. Do you feel a recommendation is unbiased if the person is getting paid for recommending it?
Rating: 4 / 5

Old Review with an unfair one star.

If you are looking for documentation on how to extend your Joomla 1.5 site with your own PHP code, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. This book would not explain anything of what you are looking for or what’s going on under the hood. They only refer to how to install and set up pre defined templates. Give the money to the republican party instead. You will get the same amount of information from them as you do from this book.

As I want to develop extensions and also templates, I thought this book at least could explain something about this. It has none. The book is useless for that matter.

It is beyond my understanding how this book has an average rating on four stars. Well, this book goes into the shelf and will probably never be opened again.

Rating: 4 / 5

101 Ways has helped me optimize my Web pages in a significant way. The advice on the use of Meta tags is a good example. I learn that most global search engines not longer use them. However, for international and intranet search engines, I will still need to set up web pages with meta tags. Solid advice like this is what motivates me to come back and write a good review for the book. So get it, use it, and profit by it!
Rating: 5 / 5