I bought Concrete5 Beginner’s Guide 1st, which is a useful book for any Concrete5 user. Recently, Packt Publishing gave me a copy of Concrete5 Beginner’s Guide 2nd. Thank you for suggesting me to write a book review. Now I have finished this book and written a review.

Remo Laubacher, the author of this book, is very active in Concrete5 community. He posted more than 3,000 messages, published 7 add-ons. His activity on Concrete5 was a trigger for me to buy his book.

This book is good for beginners, since this book has “Time for action”, “Pop quiz”, and “Summary”. “Time for action” is a section for doing a task step by step. “Pop quiz” is a section to check whether you understand or not. “Summary” is a section which summarizes what is written in the chapter. I believe these sectioning makes easy for beginners to understand Concrete5.

This book is useful for any Concrete5 user. This book covers: advanced permission, creating a theme from HTML file, creating a custom template, customizing a view of existing block, creating a block, hooking to an event. These topics are important to customize Concrete5. This book tells you how easy to customize Concrete5.

Concrete5 use the MVC architecture. This book tells us why MVC is a good architecture. MVC separates Model, View and Controller. Model covers data manipulation. View covers the representation. Controller covers application logic. When we do Database tuning, we concentrate on Model. When we create Mobile phone layout, we concentrate on View. When we change registaration screens based on user attributes, we concentrate on Controller. This books is a good introduction for MVC.

You can download the codes of this book. But be careful. No license declaration on these codes. Using these codes may violate the copyrights. (Concrete5 is lincensed under MIT, which does not care the license of the derivative works. The derivative works of Concrete5 can be anything, such as MIT, GPL, or non-commercial use only. Users must check the derivative works of Concrete5 before use them.) If you plan to use these codes, I recommend you to ask the author.

Concrete5 Beginner’s Guide 2nd is based on Concrete5.6, the latest major version at this time. If you have read Concrete5 Beginner’s Guide 1st, there are not much new to you, but there is something new to you. Even if you have read Concrete5 Beginner’s Guide 1st, I am sure that you are satisfied with this book.

Finally, I offer you, the readers of this blog, a giveaway of this book. Three lucky winners will get an e-book copy of Concrete5 Beginner’s Guide 2nd edition. If you are interested, please copy this sentence below and tweet to your followers.

"Concrete5 Beginner's Guide 2nd edition. (http://www.packtpub.com/concrete5-2e-beginners-guide/book) Review by @ounziw https://ounziw.com/2013/05/30/concrete5beginners/"

Tweets until June 18th are considered valid. This campaign is over. Thanks for those who tweeted. Multiple tweets by the same acount will be counted as one. Also, be sure to follow @ounziw, since the winners will be notified via twitter DM.