Book review: Building websites with EE2
A couple of months ago, I received an email from Packt Publishing asking me to review their book Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2. I thought “why not” and received a copy to review. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one — Tony Geer recently posted his review of the same book. Well then, here’s mine.
One of the first things mentioned in the book is who it is intended for. It is made clear it’s intended for novices and beginners of ExpressionEngine, not for experienced developers. Considering myself the latter, I wondered if I actually could review the book as I do not belong to the focus group. I decided to look more at the validity of the technical details described in the book.
Hands on
The book takes the approach of guiding the reader through the process of building an example website. This is a good approach of getting to know EE hands-on. That said, it would be even better for novices to not stick to one method or book only, but look into other resources, too.
After the introduction, the book goes on with a chapter about installation on a local server, which includes instruction on how to hide (or rename) the index.php from your urls. Here I felt like a bit too much attention went to setting up a .htaccess file. After all, hiding the index.php is not an officially supported EE feature. I’d probably give it a mention and leave it at that.
The book continues with a basic control panel tour, which includes the Template Manager. Combined with the following chapter “Moving a Website to ExpressionEngine”, it provides a explanation of EE’s basic features and workings. The next chapter, “Creating a Fully-Equipped Channel” expands on that with features like Comments and RSS.
All the steps are quite verbose and accompanied by plenty of screenshots; I’m sure newbies would appreciate this do-as-I-do-approach. Even better, there are so-called “Challenges” at the end of these chapters to encourage the reader to think for themselves instead of just following instructions. This is a good way of trying to trigger that ever important EE Lightbulb Moment™.
Personally, I would have preferred to see a more detailed description about the template parser — explaining a bit more how variables, tags, embeds and snippets work together.
The basics and a bit more
After dealing with the basics, the book explains the Member module for a bit. Then two examples are described: how to create a calendar and a Photo Gallery. Now, although practical and explained in detail, I tend to dislike that both these examples require the jQuery plugin FancyBox to work. Also, the html used in these examples isn’t the prettiest I’ve ever seen. For example, on page 217 it says:
It makes sense to display the thumbnails in a table.
No, it doesn’t. Thumbnails aren’t tabular data. Just use a list and css to style it the way you want. Despite that the markup has little to nothing to do with EE, it does affect my opinion on the book.
This trend continues for the rest of the book. In chapter 9 “Beyond the basics”, other modules like Search, Mailing List and Email are described. All the examples are based on the example site, which should be installed on your local machine. Because of this, the following warning is found throughout the book (eg. page 248):
Remember that if you are following along in a localhost environment, you will not actually be able to send outgoing e-mails
This may be the case in the author’s environment, but the MAMP installation on my Mac sure can. I find inaccuracies like this annoying and not very professional.
The final chapter deals with backing up and upgrading EE, as well as extending it with add-ons. I was pleasantly surprised to find own name in the list of developers like Pixel & Tonic, Newism and Solspace. Too bad nGen Works is held responsible for Structure instead of its authors Travis Schmeisser and Jack McDade — another inaccuracy.
Conclusion
Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2 is a solid book, especially for its focus group. Despite some glitches in the details, the technical side of things is described in detail and correctly. I have glanced at Ryan Irelan’s book, and I reckon having both books would be most beneficial to someone just starting out with the excellence that is ExpressionEngine.
Comments
I just wanted to say how much I appreciated your time & your comprehensive review. I certainly can’t argue with anything you said (and will post corrections on my website for the inaccuracies you identified).
I do agree that more than one book/resource can be invaluable - there are so many ways to approach different tasks and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks for your post and thanks to this book.you made me know a new information. But you don’t say a lot of for useful, price and information of it, too. Thanks again.