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Magento: Beginner’s Guide, a solid introduction to managing Magento stores
Often enough when you’re a Magento developer you can find yourself in a position where by a client is overwhelmed with options. They don’t know where to click, what all the fields are or mean and simply don’t know where to start. Typically with Magento training I have to provide around a week of my time per project for training a client on the subtle aspects of Magento, through from managing static blocks, to pages, to categories and products. Managing orders, importing and exporting, it all needs to be taught well so a client isn’t confused when they’re left to manage the site on their own. Now, I can provide them with this book once I’ve done training them as a reference for them to look back on for instructions and help when they need it.
What does it actually contain?
Magento: Beginner’s Guide by William Rice covers the entire back-end Magento system from a store owner’s point of view and teaches them a variety of aspects about managing their store. The fantastically written chapters include:
- Installation of Magento – covering how to get Magento installed on your server and leading you through the install process.
- Categories, Products and Attributes – covering the basics of all three and showing you how to set-up and manage both categories and attributes. (Click here to download this as a sample chapter)
- Taxes – this chapter alone saving hours of time in explanation covers how to set-up and manage the different varieties of tax rules in the system.
- Adding Simple Products – guiding you through how to set-up a simple product in Magento and what each of the fields does/means.
- Minimum Customisation of Your Store’s Appearance – leads you through the elements of Magento you have control over in your administrative back-end.
- Beyond Simple Products – guiding you through the ever important grouped and configurable products and their practical uses for your store.
- Customer Relationships – how to manage customers, newsletters and your contact form for your Magento store. Setting up and managing what features users have available to them.
- Accepting Payment – guiding through what Magento makes available to you in the form of accepting payment on your website and the configurable options that are presented.
- Configuring Shipping – taking a similar approach to the Accepting Payment chapter except guiding you through the shipping side of set-up and configuration.
- Fulfilling an order – the most important task for any Magento store owner in actually processing the order once it has come through guiding you through the process from start to finish.
- An appendix of broken down short step-by-step instructions – useful for quickly referring back to doing key tasks quickly without all the padded long explanations in between that you may not need second or third time around.
But is it any good? How does it come across?
Simply put Magento: Beginner’s Guide covers it all. It takes a personal one-on-one tutoring approach to take you through all key and important aspects of Magento. It comes across as friendly and helpful, making you feel like you don’t have to be an idiot not to know how to work with a certain feature or part of Magento. This guide is great for the completely uninitiated going into Magento and it’s great for the experienced that really just want to grasp the full power of Magento’s administrative back-end.
Can I train my staff with this book?
Before reviewing it myself I passed Magento: Beginner’s Guide onto a couple developers in the office. One of which who had worked with Magento before and one who had never looked at it. Both read the book back to front and came out with a proper understanding to the back-end of Magento, saving me from days of staff training on the topic.
Who should buy Magento: Beginner’s Guide?
People who should buy Magento: Beginner’s Guide include:
- People who like to be walked through things one-on-one
- Anyone who is getting into Magento as either a store owner or a developer for the first time
- Anyone who wants to train others in Magento
- Any store owners, who want a great reference when they’re stuck or can’t quite remember how to do something (and don’t want to pay for support from a developer/agency)
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Book review: Controversy Creates Cash
I’ve just finished reading the brilliant book that is Controversy Creates Cash, written by Eric Bischoff with the help of Jeremy Roberts. The book is a autobiography, business and wrestling book all in one. It’s a fantastic read, especially if you grew up during the peaks of WCW and WWE during the ‘Monday Night Wars’.
Not only is it a great insight into how the Turner Broadcasting/Time Warner and subsequent AOL/Time Warner mergers did nothing but slowly destroy WCW from the inside, but also a great insight into how it effected the product and the constraints it placed on what was at the time the top product in wrestling. Eric speaks honestly about a lot of things from his starting out in the wrestling industry to his first time stepping onto the WWE stage as RAW’s new general manager.
What’s inspiring about the book is the complete (and sometimes blind) passion that Eric has for the wrestling business and how this drove his success and made him a multi-millionaire at the end of his WCW contract. How it took him to the top of the wrestling industry and how he was shocked to learn just how much work Vince McMahon did at the WWE.
Anyone who grew up watching either WCW or the WWF during the monday night wars should read this book. Not only does it teach you a lot about the business, but gives insight that only Eric Bischoff could provide whilst giving a behind the scenes view on just what made WCW the company to watch during that period, and just what stopped a company that was seemingly unstoppable.
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You pick the review for this month
I’m in the last chapters of several books that I can’t seem to finish, so I thought i’d put it up for vote and see which one you guys want to hear about this month.
The choices:
- I, Woz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: Getting to the Core of Apple’s Inventor
- The Rules of Wealth: A Personal Code for Prosperity
- How to Be an Entrepreneur: The Six Secrets of Self-Made Success
I’m reading several ‘coding books’ but I’d prefer to write about these in general articles rather than single reviews that wouldn’t be all that interesting. Feel free to comment with your choice out the three and I’ll take note of it :)
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Seth Godin: Purple Cow
Purple Cowis a great book of 1-3 page tidbits accumulating in a book about how to make your idea/business so unique that people have to look at it.
The idea is that if you create a purple cow of a product/business amongst a field of ordinary cows then anyone looking at a cow in that field will see the purple cow above the rest (more often than not).
I found the book a brilliant read and managed to read it in the two days of my train journey to and from London this past weekend. Purple Cow
As an inspiring businessman for the future I found Purple Cow
Seth Godin also has an online blog if you would like to subscribe. You can find it at: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/. His official site is located at: http://www.sethgodin.com
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