von A while ago, Packt Publishing asked me to write a review of their Magento Beginner’s Guide written by William Rice, and finally I’ve found the time to have a go at it and write a couple of lines about the 300 page eBook version (there’s also a paperback version for sale).
The Beginner’s Guide aims at the following audience:
This book is for anyone who wants to create an online store using Magento. If you are a non-technical person and are discouraged by the complexity of this powerful e-commerce application, this book is ideal for you.
The author starts off by talking about installation, moves on to write about products, categories and attributes and also mentions ways of configuring shipping and payment methods. By using a large number of screenshots, the actual explanations are easy to follow. At the end of the book, there are some helpfully condensed step-by-step manuals to perform certain tasks.
Users wanting to set-up their own Magento store might find the chapter on frontend customisation a bit too cursory. Apart from changing certain alt-texts and the welcome message or installing new themes, there is not much to gather from this chapter and the study of the Magento Designer’s Guide is highly recommended. However, since the author stresses the fact that the aim of his manual is to enable readers to set up a basic Magento store rather than to talk about each and every detail (which would be, from my experience, a truly arduous task!), this is comprehensible.
All things considered, future webstore owners wanting to gain some first-hand experience with the Magento platform, the Magento Beginner’s Guide is a highly recommended read.
