“Grokking Magento: Book 1” by Vinai Kopp – an Excellent Book for Experienced Developers

We’ve got one good tradition in our blog – review books related to Magento written through authors’ experience in working with this platform. 

This time we are happy to introduce you an excellent guide for Magento developers named “Grokking Magento: Book 1 – Magento Basics and Request Flow” by Vinai Kopp. We thank Vinai for an e-copy of his book kindly provided for our review.

Vinai Kopp

Vinai Kopp is a passionate Web Developer and open source enthusiast since 1998. From March 2008 Vinai has specialized in Magento. His main focus is training and consulting.

Author, active community member and a part of the Magento community advisory board (CAB).

 

Book Review

Cover

The cover of the Grokking Magento guide is very extraordinary and everyone who sees this book wonders about that amazing creature or strange skeleton put in front of them. We’ll reveal this little secret, as it is uncovered by the author himself in the introduction. The cover is decorated with a silver fern frond, which is, in this case, both unusual and intriguing at the same time.

Audience

This book will be especially useful for highly-experienced developers, which have essential knowledge and long practice in PHP and OOP with a great desire to learn Magento. But it is also recommended to professional Magento developers as a set of nontrivial Magento solutions.

Structure

The book is a collection of exercises, which go in a cookbook stile and are not actually structured, but it is not necessary, as each one is a self-sufficient entity. All the exercises are very useful and we wanted even more.

Goals

The book has three main goals:

1. Help prepare for the Magento Certified Developer Exam (MCD);
2. To be used as a reference for best practices and Magento architecture;
3. Give solutions to specific problems in a "developer cookbook" style.

In our opinion, this guide is equally helpful for all the declared goals and may easily become a reference book for many developers.

Pros

• The guide immediately goes to coding without wasting any time;

• Contains nontrivial recipes and their detailed descriptions;

• Includes best practice examples;

• Has the same structure for all exercises.

Cons

• Readers should have considerable coding knowledge and experience;

• We had a great temptation to skip background researches and other explanatory pages and scroll down directly to solutions.

aheadWorks Definitely Recommends It

Our development team finds this book very valuable and useful for all Magento-passionate coders and especially recommends it to high-skilled programmers, who would like to plunge into Magento without a delay.

So, we congratulate Vinai on such a great piece of knowledge provided for the Magento community and look forward to other books from the Grokking Magento series.

Please share your own impressions about this book in the comments below.