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When I began my freelancing career abruptly almost two years ago, I was immediately contacted by a friend who needed some Joomla! work done. Little did I know that I would be delving into the depths of Joomla!’s API with no idea what I was doing. After receiving some guidance from Andrew Eddie, one of Joomla!’s core developers, (to whom I still owe a beer) I picked up the first edition of Mastering Joomla! 1.5 by James Kennard. That’s where my experience with this book starts. I received a copy of Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development Second Edition by Chuck Lanham and got all nostalgic as soon as I began reading it.

Enough with the nostalgia. This is a great book if you have some background with Joomla! and are ready to increase your knowledge (quite a bit). It would also help if you’ve got a good handle on PHP before jumping into this book. After a quick intro into Joomla!’s framework, it gets right into the nitty-gritty of the API. If you’re not sure what a class in PHP is, or if you’re new to the ways of MVC design patterns, you may want to at least get your feet wet in the ways of object-oriented programming first.

Building on the great job James Kennard did in the first version of the book, Joomla! whiz-kid Chuck Lanham takes the concepts of the book and explains them gracefully and clearly. Joomla! at a framework level, as brilliant as it is, is a lot to wrap your brain around. Chuck’s great writing makes reading and understanding things a lot less tedious than other technical books in this class. I found his use of examples to be mostly thorough and well thought-out, though some examples lacked full explanation that might be beneficial to a brand-new reader.

The book, overall, was really well planned, and you can tell as soon as you begin reading. The chapters are broken up thoughtfully, and the sections within the chapters guide you through the concepts logically. I never found myself flipping around, trying to figure out the explanation of a concept that should have been explained before the concept I was in the middle of reading. But while the book is a great linear-read, the fact that you can flip to a section and get some immediate clarity on the subject is a testament to not only how great of a reference book this is, but also how well it was planned out. Kudos to Chuck for balancing the front-to-back readability with the jump-to-the-spot reference nature of this book.

Despite this book being geared towards PHP developers specifically, this book should be on the shelf of anyone who ever needs to modify a Joomla! extension. In my day-to-day work I have to modify a lot of third-party extensions to meet the needs of my clients. I’ve used the awesome reference in the appendix on many occasions to see what the original developer was doing. As well, the examples in the book provide great explanations on how to extend extensions to make them do what you need.

While some “geek books”, as I call them, help you learn concepts through various learning examples, Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extension and Framework Development doesn’t require you to dig through steps in a lesson to figure out what you opened that chapter to learn. It is more of a book full of explanations and answers. I’ve had many “Ah ha!” moments reading this and the first version of this book, and I’m sure you will too.

Check out a sample chapter of the book here on Packt’s website, and let me know what you think about the book in the comments.