Jul 23 2009
Packt Publishing sent me a copy of Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6 by Leonard Murphy some months ago. Due to my hectic schedule and a desire for a life outside of work, I've only recently been able to finish it up and put my thoughts together. As you may know, here at 420 Creative, we use ExpressionEngine a lot. It runs this very site, as well as at least a dozen client websites. When I first started using it I did have to learn the hard way though - through trial and error and getting info from the **extremely helpful** community forums. That was 2-3 years ago and many of the online resources (which I mention later) I use now weren't even around then (and I wish they had been). Had this book been out it probably would've helped - it's very much directed at the absolute beginner (though it could serve as a reference or refresher for intermediate and possibly advanced users). #### The good If you are new to ExpressionEngine, this is the book for you. It explains much of the core of EE in plain English so that it's easy to read and digest. Further, you go through the learning process using an example that you can work directly off of. Plenty of screenshots are also available to help you find your way through EE's control panel as you move along. If you're an intermediate user of EE you might come away with a few things that you either didn't know about or are just a little different in approach. But those are few and far between. If you're an advanced user it's probably best to skip this book altogether. #### The not so good I wholeheartedly believe this is a good book for those new to EE, but still it has its shortcomings even for that audience. The example website the author uses is one that sells toast. While I realize that it's a fictitious website, selling toast is not only silly but impractical. Instead, it would be a much better exercise if the example was more in line with reality. And because the Simple Commerce module (and lack of a true shopping cart in EE) is discussed so quickly, avoiding a site that sells products at all would have been wiser. Instead, I'd recommend something along the lines of an informational site with a blog or similar. Even a catalog or magazine website would be a better exercise than a site that sells toast. Additionally, there was more CSS covered in the book than there needed to be. EE is a CMS and as such, requires a certain level of skill and familiarity with basic front-end web development, namely, HTML and CSS. To put it bluntly, if you can't code CSS you have no business trying to work through a CMS as robust as EE. Finally, there were some concepts that were only briefly discussed, including more details on segments and variables. EE's segments are both powerful and crucial to the way the system works and pulls data - leaving this out is a huge mistake in my opinion. #### Conclusion Overall, I think this book is decent, but only if you're a newcomer to EE. And even then I would hesitate recommending it. The reason is that there are better learning resources out there, including the EE community forums, wiki, knowledge base and documentation. But more notably, I would rather recommend Michael Boyink's website, Train-ee.com before I recommend this book. The video tutorials are even more valuable for those that learn better visually as opposed to reading. Ryan Irelan's EEScreencasts.com is another good place to start learning, though I have never tried it myself. And for resources beyond that, EE Insider and Devot-ee are great to visit and refer to again and again.