Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce is a new book from Packt which will help users to sell online using the award-winning open-source Drupal web application. Written by Michael Peacock, this book provides the essentials of getting an e-commerce website up and running with Drupal.

Drupal is a free and open-source modular web application framework and content management system (CMS) written in PHP that can run in many environments; including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. Drupal e-Commerce is a free, open-source, feature-rich, flexible package of modules that seamlessly adds full e-Store capabilities to Drupal.

Packt is pleased to announce the availability of its new book on Elgg, the free open-source tool used to create social networks. Written by Mayank Sharma, the book teaches users to create their own fully customized, hosted social network for their business, organization, or group of friends.

Elgg is an open-source social web application licensed under GPL version 2, and runs on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) or WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform. It offers a networking platform combining elements of blogging, e-portfolios, news feed aggregation, file sharing, and social networking.

Following the latest release of Drupal 6 in February 2008, Packt Publishing is pleased to announce an update to David Mercer’s best selling Drupal 4.7 book. Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 is as much of an overhaul of the original book as Drupal 6 is over Drupal 4.7.

Drupal is a hugely popular and widely celebrated open-source Content Management System that is day-by-day becoming the first choice of people for building blogs and other websites. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Hillary Clinton, and many others utilize Drupal to fulfil their online requirements.

The updated book meets the booming demand for well presented, clear, concise, and above all practical information on how to move from establishing the need for a website all the way through to designing and building it like a pro, and finally successfully managing and maintaining it.

Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 is a new book from Packt which is written as a practical step-by-step guide to building a website from scratch. Written by Hagen Graf, this book takes the reader through the tasks essential to create a Joomla! website as rapidly as possible.

Joomla! started as a fork from Mambo in 2005, when many of the original developers of the Mambo CMS moved to working on Joomla! It has rapidly grown in popularity and is a cutting Edge Content Management System and one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management systems in the world. It is used world-wide for anything from simple homepages to complicated corporate websites. It is easy to install, easy to manage and very reliable.

Last October, Packt Publishing sent me one of their latest books on the Plone CMS, Professional Plone Development. This is a book I had been saving for review until I had a chance to install and use Plone myself. Plone is one of those CMS that I've really wanted to learn more about by installing it on the server myself. Unfortunately, too many things on my "I want" list have had to compete with my "I need" list and I never got around to installing Plone. With no Plone on the server, I unfortunately never got around to reviewing the Plone book written by Martin Aspeli either.

This book is aimed at "developers who want to build content-centric web applications leveraging Plone’s proven user interface and flexible infrastructure". Given the fact that I haven't installed Plone myself, I can't honestly give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on the book. However, what I can do is talk a little about the book and let you decide for yourself if this book is worthy of your hard earned money.

Packt is pleased to announce the release of a new book titled Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5. Written by Hasin Hayder, this book will teach users to understand the core object-oriented programming concepts with PHP and to write manageable applications with ease.

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that uses "objects" and their interactions to design applications and computer programs. It was basically introduced to ease the development process as well as reduce the time of development by reducing the amount of code needed.

PHP is one of the most popular languages for web application development, and PHP5 supports OOP very well. This book will help users to master core OOP features in PHP as well as advanced Topics like Design Patterns including Model-View-Controller (MVC), and Unit Testing.

Comprehensive documentation and working examples on the Standard PHP Library (SPL), which are hard to find elsewhere, are provided in this book. Users will find this book useful to leverage PHP’s OOP features to write manageable applications with ease.

Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 is published and is available with Packt. For more information about this book, please visit www.packtpub.com/oop-php-5/book

osCommerce Webmaster’s Guide to Selling Online is a new book from Packt Publishing that will help users increase their sales and profits with expert tips on SEO, Marketing, Design and Selling Strategies. Written by Vadym Gurevych, this book is packed with expert advice and practical examples of effective store design and report creation to help anyone administering an osCommerce site make better decisions, formulate more effective strategies, and measure success.

osCommerce is an open-source e-commerce solution written in PHP and MySQL that can be set up on various platforms. More than 10,000 businesses and sole traders all around the world have benefited from its features and flexibility. There are many modules for osCommerce that further extend its functionality, making it suitable for almost every business's requirements.

Packt is pleased to announce the release of a new book Managing eZ Publish Web Content Management Projects. Written by Martin Bauer of designit.com.au , an eZ publish Silver partner, this book will take users through the process of successfully managing an eZ publish web content management project in an efficient and effective manner.

eZ Publish is an enterprise open-source CMS (content management system) and development framework with functionality for web publishing, intranets, e-commerce, extranets, and web portals.

The book presents strategies, best practices, and techniques for all steps of a user's eZ publish project, starting from client requirements, through planning, information architecture and content modeling, design considerations, and right up to deployment, client training, maintenance, support, and upgrades.

This book is well worth the money you'll be spending on it.

A couple weeks ago, I found on my doorstep Hagen Graf's book, Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 Beta 1.  The book was sent to me by the book's publisher, Packt Publishing, in hopes that I would review the book on the Joomla! content management system here at CMSReport.com.  While I do not promise to review every book or Internet link that comes my way, I always appreciate the opportunity to do such reviews.  In this case, I was eager to review the book since I have lost track of the new features introduced in version 1.5 since Joomla! 1.0 first arrived in 2005.

There was a time when I thought technical reference books would be a thing of the past.  Why would anyone purchase a book when all you needed to do was go to your favorite Internet search engine and after a few clicks of the mouse find your answer?  Lately though, I've found that the Internet is still no match for that thing we all call a book.

The problem with the Internet isn't that there is not enough information on the Internet but that at times there is too much information.  For example, if you type in joomla components at Google.com you'll find around 2.17 million results. Joomla 1.5 Beta attempts to deliver information for the same keywords in less than 70 pages (Chapter 5 - "Components and Extensions").  Overall, the author does a good job in giving the reader the information he or she needs for developing a website with Joomla within the book's 360 pages.