Richard Castera

Recently I obtained a copy of Magento Beginner’s Guide by William Rice from Packt Publishing. This book is great, I would recommend it to any new or existing Magento store owner. It servers as an excellent reference guide for experienced users and a great beginners guide for new store owners.

Magento is the world’s most evolved e-commerce solution and runs on the Apache/MySQL/PHP platform. From one installation, users can control multiple storefronts, all sharing customer and product information. Magento’s templates and themes enable users to customize the look and feel of their store, even optimizing it for mobile phones. Extensions enable them to connect Magento to a large number of payment gateways and shipping services.

Who this book is written for:
This book is for anyone who wants to create an online store using Magento. If you are a non-technical person and are discouraged by the complexity of this powerful e-commerce application, this book is ideal for you.

What you will learn from this book:

• Install and configure Magento and add products to your online catalog
• Create categories and attributes to build your catalog of products
• Enhance your products with descriptions, images, and inventory information
• Create product categories to help your customers navigate your online store
• Automatically apply sales tax rules to different shipping addresses and different types of products
• Present and sell products in groups and sets
• Display products related to the one that is being viewed by a customer
• Offer your customer choices for a product’s size, color, or other attribute and give discounts based on quantities
• Accept payments using Paypal, credit cards, and checks/money orders and offer a variety of shipping options
• Create your own, customized shipping rates and connect to shippers such as UPS, FedEx, and USPS

Thanks to Jude at Packt Publishing for inviting me to write this review.

I also cannot underestimate these useful resources:

• Magento User Guide
• Magento Community Board
• Magento Community Wiki
• Magento Knowledge base
• Magento Webinar
• Magento Screencasts