Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress Review

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Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress ReviewWhen I picked up this book I knew what phpBB was (my main reason for getting the book), but the other two applications were foreign to me. So, let me start off by briefly pointing out what each application is and does:
- Drupal is a CMS, content management system, (think Wikipedia) that allows users to input and update information
- phpBB is bulletin board software (very much like Invision or Jolt from surface appearances)
- WordPress is blogging software (do I really need to say more after 2005, the year of the Blog)
The publisher has chosen to group what amounts to three separate books on three open source applications together based upon the 'community' aspects that they engender, allowing groups of users to come together to post, comment and counter-comment.
The book is effectively a collected user manual for these three applications, but that does not really go far enough. Yes, the material for each is available online, but this book collects the documentation together in a user friendly manner. Anyone that has tried to install and operate a complex piece of software based upon the canned manuals can appreciate the complexity involved. Using this book is essentially like having an experienced guru looking over your shoulder offering advice as you go through the process. This can be the difference between 30-60 minutes of simple work and 5-6 hours of confusion, frustration and ranting.
Add to this the advice on configuration and usage/management for avoiding pitfalls and achieving best case results, and this book can pay for itself in no time (I bill at $50 an hour and consider my personal time even more valuable).
Bottom line, if you want to keep users on your site (i.e. not farm out these services), and want to use a CMS, bBoard, or Blog using open source software, it is worth your time to check out these options. If you then decide to use one of them, this book can save you a chunk of time and frustration.
P-)Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress OverviewWhether you want to build a community with a content management system, a bulletin board, or a blog, Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress is the authoritative guide using Open Source software. Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/) is a full content management system that allows you to create any type of web site you desire, from an eCommerce to a community-based site. With phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com/) you can set up a bulletin board or forum. And WordPress is fast becoming the software of choice for the exploding blog community. Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and Wordpress is authored by a team of experts, including Jared Smith, a long time support team member of the phpBBHacks.com web site who has been building sites with phpBB since the first beta releases, and Mike Little, the founder and a contributing developer of the WordPress project.

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Practical Rails Projects (Expert's Voice) Review

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Practical Rails Projects (Expert's Voice) ReviewPractical Rails Projects is a weighty tome, coming in just shy of 600 pages, which led to this review taking a little longer than it otherwise might: not just because the book took a while to get through, but also because it wasn't quite so practical to lug it on the bus as some of the others I've recently covered. A result of that heft is a fairly comprehensive volume, but one that doesn't feel quite so consistent as it perhaps should.
Eldon Alameda has written the book for people who have some previous Rails experience or may have cracked open one of the introductory books on offer, but who want to learn the framework by observing a number of working projects. In some ways that leads to overlap with a book like Practical Rails Social Networking Sites (Expert's Voice), but whereas that built up one example this book covers seven ranging from a system to track progress through an exercise programme, to an appointment scheduler that interfaces with 37signals' Highrise using ActiveResource.
The first few projects proceed at an even pace and are likely to be helpful to a newcomer to Rails, there's a fair bit of overlap with examples available in other volumes, but they work well together. While the author discusses the decision to skip over the writing of tests and/or specs, it did seem that in a volume of this size that topic should have been given a little space, even if that involved sacrificing one of the sample projects.
Unfortunately the book loses pace a little later on, particularly with the introduction of the Ext JS library which is used to build user interfaces but ends up occupying far more space than the actual Rails code in the later chapters. Obviously Javascript frameworks are an important part of building many modern web applications and Ext JS is a worthy entrant, but the way it was used seemed quite inappropriate. The admin interfaces built with it would not gracefully degrade for users without javascript; there was no discussion of progressive enhancement or even of why the decision had been taken to build such an inaccessible system. When careful use of respond_to blocks can make progressive enhancement so straightforward in Rails, this seems a missed opportunity. At the very least the decision making process should have been documented, and ideally a better solution would have been offered.
I was similarly surprised to find a number of occasions where design decisions were made that conflicted with the RESTful approach that is now Rails convention. Early on that might have been one thing, but coming after a chapter extolling the virtues of resource-centric design that was quite a surprise and seemed an indication that the book had begun to sprawl a bit. In many ways it's a shame that this book wasn't broken up into a couple of volumes. Packaging the first few projects together as an introduction, then offering the last few as smaller supplements more tightly focussed on specific areas such as Ext JS usage, ActiveResource, etc. That way the material could have been tightened up and some of the repetition would have made more sense, and perhaps there would have been space to cover a few obvious missing pieces such as atom/rss feeds.
With a number of volumes now available that use specific projects to illustrate Rails techniques, this book isn't so distinctive as it might have been a few months ago, and many developers will probably want to go for a more focussed, more succinct option. If your learning style benefits from taking things slowly and you don't mind some repetition then this may be a good option, but don't forget to read up on accessible web development while exploring later chapters.
Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.Practical Rails Projects (Expert's Voice) OverviewRuby on Rails is currently a very hot technology, and its popularity is still growing. Practical Ruby on Rails Projects provides intermediate Rails users with an essential learning aid to take them to higher level, teaching them countless real world techniques via a series of practical project-based chapters. Each chapter takes the reader through the complete process of building up a full-functional Rails web application.Projects taught in the book include a blog, a REST-based task manager, an online IT help desk, a web comic (including image upload facilities,) Wiki, and much more. Techniques learned include speeding up development with plugins, engines and Ruby Gems, styling with CSS libraries, and adding dynamism using Ajax.

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