Product Description
Ready-to-use recipes to customize and extend your e-commerce website osCommerce expert “Monika in Germany” lets you in on her secrets on how to hack your way to that perfect osCommerce site Create new modules and custom-code your default osCommerce installation Add extensions and features like category driven designs and individual shipping modules In Detail osCommerce has been around since March 2000. At present there are over 10,000 live, registered osC… More >>
WEB DESIGN Made Easy – How to
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#1 by Poker Pro on May 15, 2010 - 8:55 pm
UPDATE: Despite the organized attack on this review (8 negative comments in 2 days… really?) I maintain this book is a terrible value. Do not be too quickly persuaded by the other glossy reviewers and spam negative ratings on my review.
The problem with most programming books is that their authors, while perhaps adept at computer programming languages, are generally less than fluent when it comes to human communication. They basically fail to explain their points in clear and enticing language. This book suffers from the worst of both worlds: its author is a poor writer who employs a series of annoying “cookbook” anecdotes to hide a serious lack of skill with the subject matter discussed. The result is an overpriced series of tutorials that are difficult to read and could just as easily be found on various online discussion forums for free.
I will start by acknowledging the need for a book on this topic: OsCommerce, while free and open source, is absolutely nightmarish to configure. In fact, if one were starting from scratch, I cannot recommend avoiding OsCommerce more strongly. Go with the modern, open-source ZenCart instead. OsCommerce’s lack of flexibility, readily-accessible configuration options, and failure to make use of any template system is astounding. These problems are further compounded by a default style that is truly heinously ugly and unprofessional, in my not so humble opinion. Clearly there is room for a book that will show you how to configure and improve upon this system.
But this isn’t it. The author here has copied and pasted various OsCommerce hacks gleaned from the online message boards supporting that program and simply thrown them into this book in a barely organized fashion. Then she has added an introductory sentence for each copied and pasted tip along the lines of “Mmmm, here’s a fine helping of sizzling stir-fried goodness for your store” and throws on a “Bon appetit!” at the end. Over and over again. There is no attempt to explain anything about the inner workings of OsCommerce or how to extend upon her hacks to develop anything like a working understanding of how to truly configure your OsCommerce store. You’re just dropped into the middle of each hack and left to either copy what she’s doing exactly or find your own solution to these issues.
Programming books should explain what you’re doing at all times and why. They should also adopt a professional and explanatory tone, not attempt to be unnecessarily cute (which always comes across as hopelessly annoying) with humorless anecdotes. They should also offer value over and above what you could find for free on an Internet message forum. This book fails on all counts, and given its high price, I have no choice but to give it the lowest rating possible for lack of value alone.
Rating: 1 / 5
#2 by Athena Raven on May 15, 2010 - 10:24 pm
This was an absolutely delightful book! I am a complete novice to osCommerce and almost didn’t purchase the book as it was not marked as a “beginners” book. What a mistake that would have been. With this book my site went from ho-hum to professional and functional and fantastic (IMHO).
I was so impressed that I sent the author this message: “I love the cookbook style layout. Showing you what you will be doing, telling you what ingredients (pages) you will need and then taking you into detailed steps as to what needs to be done. There is no pretension in The Cook Book. The humor is great too. It really brings it to the comprehension level of the novice and still serves as a guide for those who are already “in the know”.
If you decide to write another Cook Book style book, please shout it from the roof tops so I can hear it all the way here in Costa Rica. I can’t wait to see more of your wit, know-how, and style.”
Expert or novice, everyone will find simple and detailed recipes to improve your site. As mentioned in one of the other reviews, a zip file with all the recipes is available for those of us with fingers that live in fear of code.
Good Luck!
Athena
Rating: 5 / 5
#3 by Henri Behar on May 15, 2010 - 10:49 pm
This book is a great reference to work with. It has lots of nice options to add to osCommerce that will fine tune your site. Very entertaining to read with the Cookbook stile, as a recipe you follow very clear instructions and you are sure you will not “burn” your program… it will come out nice and “tasty”!!! Great book to have and to use every time you need a little extra in your osCommerce site. I recommend this book absolutely!!
Rating: 5 / 5
#4 by David F. Wilkinson Jr. on May 15, 2010 - 11:37 pm
Deep Inside osCommerce is proof that you can teach techie material without making your readers yawn. I downloaded the sample chapter from the author’s website before I bought the book – I wanted to make sure I would not get the same style of book as the original osCommerce documentation or even the contributions. I saw immediately that this book is laid out in a completely different way, it is presented like a cookbook, a casual touch which I enjoyed very much.
I like the consistent style which shows you the status quo, lists the pages you will need to add or modify, and also shows which results you can expect from the finished module or “recipe”. The step by step instructions are very clear and user-friendly.
This is not a book that you read cover to cover, instead you check the available recipes and pick and choose the ones that work for you to revamp your store. There were a few nice surprises too: the novel gift wrapping module offering a variety of wrapping paper and an extremely easy affiliate module. This book can be read like a dictionary – you only look up what you need to know – so you might think of it as a collection of contributions; some big, some small. The steps for implementation are explained well instead of just saying “add this” or “change that” which is normally the case in the install.txt files of contributions. This makes for a deeper understanding of the underlying code and allows for your own changes. The author encourages you throughout the book to do your own “hacking of the hack”. I think that this book is a great extension to the contribution section on the osCommerce site.
Since the book offers ready made recipes of all levels, I’m sure every store owner will find modules to add to their shop. You can definitely expand your knowledge about osCommerce with this book and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone. Happy reading!
Rating: 5 / 5
#5 by C. Stones on May 16, 2010 - 1:20 am
I have many years of programming experience in Java, C++, ABAP and hey, even BASIC, so PHP was not that difficult to pick up. So… how hard can it be to tweak one’s own web shop?
Driven by all positive reviews I decided to buy this book, as I was eager to extend my knowledge in how to maintain and extend the horrendous code base called osCommerce.
The book’s approach seemed promising and original, but it proved to be a disappointing experience for me. Many recipes provided very limited added value, e.g. recipe 21: Sort product listing by date added.
Yes my dear readers, we are going to modify an existing “order by” clause of an SQL statement. Now that required some serious hax0r skills, didn’t it!?
Or recipe 44: Personalize your order confirmation email…
Yes!! Let’s perform some highly sophisticated string concatenation to add “Hi, OKTHXBYE!!1!” to the order confirmations.
’nuff said?
The screenshots don’t show very well what is going to change and the additions made to the code are quite basic, requiring additional refining to make it suit one’s needs.
I wanted to know how the internals of osCommerce worked and where I should start digging if I need to change things. I wanted to know what to look out for. I wanted to have explanations with my code snippets on *why* a certain implementation was chosen. When I see “Deep inside” in a software title, I expect to see deep inside the machine.
Oh, and besides, many of those improvements are already available in the support forums on osCommerce.com. Without the annoying “Bon apetitses” and “All you can eatses!” stir-fried through the gobbledigook code snippet mash in every #$%@-ing chapter. For free!
If you want to know all about things Deep Inside… osCommerce, then you’d better stick this book somewhere else
Deep Inside
Cheers!
Rating: 1 / 5