While Magento is a great platform, it’s not for the faint of heart. I often hear people compare Magento to other popular open source platforms such as Zen Cart and Open Cart. The reality is they are quite different platforms, with Magento’s “sweet spot” being medium sized businesses, with Open Cart, Zen Cart, etc, being better suited to smaller stores. If you aren’t expecting to turnover $1 million/year Magento may not be the right platform.

Due to the greater complexity of Magento, and that most users will want significant customization (I’ve been involved in several large Magento deployments), there is a need for some good books to assist developers get the most out of the platform.

The Magento Development Cookbook has the tagline
“Extend your Magento store to the optimum level by developing modules and widgets”
The book is very practical, focussing on specific example scenarios and showing you how to achieve them. For example, creating a “Last 5 Tweets” module. Even if you don’t want one, the principles behind it will be useful for a similar 3rd party data source you may want to aggregate.

The instructions are very step by step and anyone with some basic programming/LAMP experience should be able to get up and running pretty quickly.

The main criticism of the book is the writing style is a bit clunky and awkward at times. It feels like there hasn’t been an editor on the book at all. One example (albeit a particularly bad one) is “It seems like good advice to reload the apache.” However, overall it’s not too bad and easy to understand.

Magento 1.4 Themes Design addresses the extremely powerful Magento theming engine. This is well deserving of a book in itself as this is both a very powerful part of Magento, and a place where developers are likely to spend a lot of their time.

It covers both how to modify one of the out of the box themes and also how to start a theme from scratch. It also includes lots of hints and tips on use of CSS, often a weakness of back end developers. The author has clearly spent a lot of time with Magento themes, has the battle wounds, and has shared his experiences and learnings freely.

Heavy use of screen captures makes it easy to follow and helps the reader to understand.

Overall, if you are working on a Magento project, both these books could save you a lot of time and pain.

It’s a magazine format publication that weighs in at 264 pages, including ads. It’s not too ad heavy fortunately – maybe only 20 pages or less.

Overall, I was a bit disappointed. For $50 there’s quite a range of books I could get which would offer no end of value. This is magazine format, but it’s also magazine style. Much of the deep content is written by vendors. For example, there’s a three page article about using video to enhance ecommerce written by – guess who – a CEO of a company supplying video services. To their credit, the articles are well written and not advertorials. However, take a guess what the conclusion of the article is – is video good or bad? I’ll leave it up to you to decide on that.

There is also a lot of “case studies”. They are indeed case studies, but lack any sort of meaningful analysis. The case studies almost invariably start with what they did (eg deploy an open source solution, add page features, create a social networking environment, etc) and attempt to draw broad conclusions from that. There is no meaningful analysis at all, and no attempt to try and relate multiple similar case studies. What would have been useful would be “three companies embarked on similar projects, here’s the three approaches they took and how the outcome differed as a result”. Once again, they are written in a journalistic style.

About 120 pages are a “features and functions of the top 500″, showing a breakdown of the top 500 internet retailers. There’s not much insight here, just facts and figures, most readily available (although not all – it does include session length which I found interesting).

That’s followed by another 40 pages of listing vendors broken down by category (CMS, tracking, etc). Top that off with 20 pages with even more filler: lists of interesting books, glossary and a supplier directory, you’re left with a distinct feeling of “where’s the beef?”

Overall, it is probably of mild interest to some people, and it is only $49. Personally, I can’t see myself purchasing the 2009 edition.