Jason Leveille's Blog

Over the last 2 years I have listened to the buzz surrounding EE.  On at least 3 occasions I installed EE, only to be completely turned away by the administrative interface (one of these occasions I even purchased a personal license).  Admittedly, disregarding a perfectly valid CMS purely for aesthetic disagreements is very shortsighted.  After reading  Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6, I now wish I had taken the time 2 years ago to look beyond the UI, and focus more on the functionality that EE would have brought to my projects.  This book provided me with that missing piece of the puzzle, and now there is no question that this CMS will be on my options list when attempting to make good choices for my employer, and consequently for our clients.  If you have experience with the limitations of other solutions, and you are curious how EE can help you solve the problems you inevitably need to solve in your client projects, than this book is for you.

The Parts I Liked

Coming into this book, there were 3 questions I wanted answered:

1. How flexible is the template system?
2. How easy is it to manage access control on a group and user basis?
3. How easy is it to write custom solutions that integrate with EE?

Questions 1 and 2 were answered in thorough fashion, and as far as I’m concerned are worth the price of the book.  Question 3 was answered to some extent (through the good coverage of custom fields), as well as the brief discussion of the difference between modules, plugins, and extensions.  The important point here is that the book answers the question, “Can EE be extended”.  The answer is a definite yes.

The Parts I Struggled With

As you may have noticed, I only gave this book a 4/5 star rating.  In general, I felt that too much time was spent on non EE specific topics.  For example, I don’t want to read about CSS in an EE book.  Tell me if there are any integration points I need to be made aware of, but please don’t try to teach me about CSS.  The time you’ve wasted on this topic (covered in hundreds - thousands? - of other books elsewhere) would have been better spent on EE (for example, with more details on writing your own modules/plugins/extensions).  I also found the example application subject matter (selling toast) to be a distraction.

Conclusion

I’m not familiar with the online documentation for EE, so I can’t say if this book would give you anything that you couldn’t find online.  If you are like me, you are curious about the buzz surrounding EE, and you have a real need for a solution that makes it easy to solve real problems (see points 1 - 3 above), than this book will provide you with a great introduction.  It is written at a remedial level, but as far as I’m concerned that doesn’t detract from the book.  I wasn’t looking for howto answers as much as I was looking for a “what can you do for me” answers, and I got that.