Silverstripe - The Complete Guide to CMS Development product reviews

It's been some time since I have sat down with a book and learned something new - most of my learning these days is done via online tutorials and asking questions in the forums. While learning all about ORM and MVC isn't everyone's idea of bedtime reading, I found it rather useful to be able to learn about Silverstripe without needing to have a computer handy. I understand this book has been selling well, and this makes sense - the information is well presented, and has certainly addressed many of the questions / frustrations I have had so far.

My experience with Silverstripe up until now has been helping out a client when she gets stuck with something on her site. She isn't particularly technically minded, but has managed to do a great job of installing and figuring out Silverstripe herself. I'm no expert either, and this book appealed as it gives a good overview of what Silverstripe can do, and more importantly, where to put your code snippets in order to get a particular job done. I would think that 'Silverstripe - The complete guide to CMS development' would be a very good resource for enthusiasts like her as well as full-time developers like myself.

The book starts off with the basics - firstly explaining the Silverstripe way of doing things - why it's better to have the developer add a snippet of code to get a job done instead of having pages and pages of options that are never used (I'm looking at you Magento). An overview of the architecture of the product is given first up, which is good especially as Silverstripe makes lots of assumptions about certain things. For example if you name your classes and files correctly, it will do a lot of the work for you automatically.

'Silverstripe - The complete guide to CMS development' includes a chapter on how to use the admin section which would be appropriate for showing to the end user, but the sections discussing the development and backend functions was what caught my interest. While a lot of the information in the book is available if you dig around in the documentation, forums, mailing lists and Google, the book presents the information in one place, in a clean and consistent format, with examples, and downloadable code if you need it. Silverstripe has plenty of features that are present in other CMS systems - templates, hooks, data escaping etc - these concepts are all familiar, but are handled differently in each CMS or framework. Having an overview of how each of these concepts are handled in Silverstripe makes the next job that much easier.

I'll be starting out simple of course, but I'm now feeling a lot better about developing my next web project using Silverstripe. 'The complete guide' has filled in enough blanks to make the product useful to me, and saves me having to pour hours of time into other learning mediums. I can recommend this book as an excellent resource and reference for web developers, and also anyone who is familiar with HTML and wanting to learn how to take the next step. Silverstripe is a good framework to develop with, and is useful for basic brochure sites through to complex web apps.