Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6

published on Oct 07th, 2008 // 1 Comment

A brand new book hit the shelves in August of this year authored by Leonard Murphy. The book bills itself as "Go from the basics of setting up ExpressionEngine to creating professional ExpressionEngine websites with this concise, practical guide."

The book is one of the first out there on the market, the other that comes to mind is the self published ‘Building an ExpressionEngine Site – Small Business‘.

I have had the book ready to review for quite a while and finally got some time to read through it. First impressions is that it is a well written guide. The book assumes you are at a beginner level developing with ExpressionEngine and have some HTML and CSS experience. The book contains step-by-step instructions which are well organised with lots of screenshots and code examples.

The book extends the ExpressionEngine userguide and offers solutions which you may not come across readily while doing a general browse of the material currently available. It mentions specifically the ‘lightbulb‘ moment when everything in ExpressionEngine suddenly becomes clear and practical in your mind. The book’s purpose is to help you reach this goal. At the end of the book Leonard provides useful exercises that get your brain working to apply all the logic and lessons that he has tutored you on throughout the book.

The book seems to cover everything and not shy away from any components of ExpressionEngine but particular areas could have done with a bit of extending and still may have readers scratching their heads as to where it all fits in. The example site throughout the book is a pretty dire example to use. It is not a pretty example but it conveys all the practicalities an example site needs. I just thought that it would have been a really good commercial advantage having an example site that a reader could aspire to being able to build at the end of the book.

The book was released rather close to the supposed release of EE 2.0 but I don’t think that will affect a lot of its content. I also think the book could have listed a few more resources. Other CMS giants which have been around a lot longer than ExpressionEngine have the advantage of having a large pile of printed and on-line training material. I think Leonard has done a great job of laying the foundations of ExpressionEngine’s own unique pile.

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Building Websites with Expression Engine 1.6