Book

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.

Last week, someone that goes by the name of Anti sent me an e-mail stating that she finally got a copy of the John K. Vandyk's and Matt Westgate's Drupal book, Pro Drupal Development.  To my surprise she also congratulated me for being quoted on the inside front cover.  Having a quote by me included in the book was a welcome surprise.

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!

What seems like a very long time since I first heard about and ordered the new Drupal book, Pro Drupal Development, it finally arrived at my doorstep. So far, I have only read Chapter 1, "How Drupal Works", and glanced at the remaining pages of the book but I'm very impressed. The book is written in a very easy, well organized, and informative writing style.

Kshipra Singh from Packt Publishing sent me an e-mail the other day asking us to publish another one of their sample chapters here at CMS Report.   If you recall, we posted an article on one of the sample chapters from a book on Alfresco.  The book this time around is Mastering TypoScript: TYPO3 Website, Template, and Extension Development.  Long name for a title so why don't we dig a little deeper and find out what this book is really about.

TypoScript is a declarative programming language that offers developers, administrators, and designers full control over the configuration of TYPO3 and its template engine. Only with a good command of TypoScript can you leverage the powerful capabilities of the TYPO3 engine, to customize and control all aspects of your TYPO3 sites. If you're serious about TYPO3 as your content platform, you need to master TypoScript.

As before, I don't have the book in front of me and this should not be considered a review of the book.  Instead, I'm only allowing Packt Publishing through this post to give you a taste of what the book has to offer.  You need to decide for yourself if you want to buy the book.  The following is what the book intends for the reader to learn:

I have been doing a lot of reading lately.  More specifically, I have been reading a lot of IT reference books.  In fact, I venture to say that I'm probably one of the few people who ever brought a book on version control systems to the hospital while waiting for neurosurgery.  I really didn't  get much read that day, but I think I still get bragging rights!

Kshipra Singh of Packt Publishing sent me an e-mail the other day. Packt Publishing focuses on the publication of computer and information technology books intended to be read by developers, administrators, and newbies. Mr. Singh wanted to let me know that they just recently published a new book for the Alfresco CMS. The book is titled, Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation, and is written by Munwar Sharrif.

Packt Publishing has offered me "a sample chapter from this book, to be published" here at CMS Report . To make things easy we decided just to offer the link onsite to the sample chapter stored directly on Packt Publishing's servers. You can download the the sample chapter in PDF format. The sample chapter being provided is Chapter 5, "Implementing Document Management".

Given that I only have the sample chapter on Alfresco to read, I hesitate to offer any type of review for the book. I will say, however, that just in the opening pages of the sample chapther the author had my attention on his reasons for using Alfresco as well as writing the book.

Unlike most other open-source CMSes, which offered only web content management, Alfresco provided a wide range of solutions to Enterprise customers with an impressive roadmap. And most importantly, it is created using completely open standards. This excited us a lot, and we started implementing Alfresco in many enterprises...I have trained many users, administrators, and developers in Alfresco and many other systems. This book distils the hands-on approach of my training courses into a concise, practical book. The book focuses on business needs rather than technical syntax.

The author also make a brief mention that there are currently around 1700 content management systems out there on the market.  No wonder I have been feeling a little behind keeping up on today's content management systems!  Either way, if you have read or are reading the book...I'd be glad to hear your thoughts on either Alfresco or the book.  Feel free to leave your comments here on this page.