Magento PHP Developer's Guide

by Allan MacGregor

Get up and running with the highly customizable and powerful e-commerce solution, Magento This book is written for PHP developers who are familiar with frameworks such as Zend or CakePHP and want to start developing and working with Magento. No prior knowledge of Magento is required. In the world of e-commerce, there are dozens of tools available to use in custom web design and development. Out of all of these options, Magento is the web's fastest growing e-commerce platform. Its architecture makes it possible to extend the functionalities using plugins, which are shared by the community, extensively. This book is a practical guide packed with examples so developers can understand its fundamental concepts and then start developing and testing Magento code. The book starts by building your knowledge of Magento, providing you with the techniques and tools you require to start your first Magento development. You will then learn to work with data collections and the EAV system, before gradually moving on to extending the frontend and backend. You will learn all about deploying and distributing custom modules. This book will help you navigate your way around your first Magento developments, helping you to avoid all of the most common headaches that new developers face when first getting started.

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Niko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Magento PHP Developer's Guide is a very good primer for anyone interested in developing on the Magento e-commerce platform.

It is very obvious from the get-go that the author knows his trade. The book starts with a "quick" (a 100 page or so) fly-over of all the central Magento concepts. While it is a bit tedious to wade through pages of code listings from the Magento Core modules, the effort pays off and the reader is rewarded with a very comprehensive view of all the relevant aspects of Magento internals.

The actual core part of the book, that is developing a Magento module from scratch, is very well put together and extensively covers everything from setting up to all the way to extending the Magento API.

This is over and beyond anything I've seen before for Magento tutorials, and even as a reasonably seasoned Magento developer I picked up new titbits all along the way.

Delightfully the book also covers most of the relevant software engineering practices that any Magento developer should be aware of: the book starts with instructions for setting up a virtual machine for development, and finishes with automated testing and QA, and even touches on deployments.

While none of these topics are covered in depth, they offer an invaluable introduction to the bleeding edge best practices for Magento and PHP development.

All the topics covered are also accompanied by relevant sidebar links to Magento documentation and further information on the web. Unfortunately, as of reading, the companion website for the book was still largely under construction.

I would wholeheartedly recommend the book for anyone looking into developing on the Magento platform, with the caveat that some of the information might already be a bit out of date as a new minor release (version 1.8) of the Magento Community Edition was just released.

[Matías Simone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Magento PHP DEveloper's Guide it's a good book for get the main concepts.