Magento Beginners Guide (Book Review)

Last week I recieved a copy of Packt’s new book “Magento Beginners Guide“, written by William Rice. Alltough I’ve already got another book on that topic, I’ve read through it. It begins at the basics and also explains in detail how to upload stuff via FTP to your hosting provider. Then it goes on to describe how to set-up a Magento Onlineshop from the beginning. Categories, Taxes, Style customization, the different product types, handling payment and shippings are all covered together with some other topics.

Overall, the book makes a very positivie impression, especially since Packt seems to have changed their typography since the last book I’ve read. It’s well illustrated and contains many screenshots with detailed step by step tutorials. I’d like to recommend this book to everyone that is looking for a helpful book for Magento Newbies.

There’s just one remark to the content that bugs me: The author writes that Magento can be run “on almost every hosting service”. Well, technically that’s true. It will work – somehow. But as soon as your store grows, Magento will eat up way too much performance and it will get pretty slow on a shared hosting infrastructure. I don’t see this as a problem for Magento Shop-Owners, if the store grows, they should be able to pay a dedicated hosting. But that should be mentioned somewhere in the book.