Pocket Revolutionary

Since Packt successfully owns the English-language market on TYPO3 books, I’ve defaulted to buying about a half-dozen of their books over the years. In fact, I’ve talked to them about my own book that could one day be announced. I’ve had some mixed results with their books at times (non-native English can be scary), but I was still a little giddy when they contacted me and asked if I would write a review for their newest book, TYPO3 4.3 Multimedia Cookbook by Dan Osipov. I mean, I like TYPO3, multimedia, and writing content for my site. Score! So, it got here yesterday, I dutifully read it, and I can definitely say, “yeah, it’s a cookbook.” That’s not good or bad, it just is. If you aren’t going to read this whole review or are already bored with me, here’s the snapshot review: If you have written some extensions and just need a bunch of “recipes” for integration with audio, video, Flickr, S3, and YouTube, then it’s probably not a bad thing to have this on your shelf; if you want to learn the concepts behind the code, I’d check out TYPO3 Extension Development by Dmitry Dulepov.

Now that we’ve eliminated the lazy readers, let’s get down to business. TYPO3 4.3 Multimedia Cookbook is, like you would guess, essentially 200 pages of little extensions, TypoScript tips, and server hacks for sites with audio, video, images, and pretty much everything that’s not text. It says that it’s aimed at “anyone running or starting a website with multimedia” and recommends “prior knowledge of TYPO3”. That’s pretty vague, but it kind of sounds like everybody with a TYPO3 site to me.

In reality, I think the target they hit was a lot smaller. To actually understand what’s going on, you’re going to want some extensions under your belt. One of my only real problems with the book is that it’s supposed to be targeted at people with “prior knowledge of TYPO3”, and that sounds way too broad compared to who will actually get much out of it. Honestly, I would recommend having some real extensions (with actual PHP you’ve written) under your belt before attempting almost anything in the latter half of the book. If you’re only copying and pasting you can probably make it through without a lot of experience, but— hold on, I need my soapbox for this — you should never, never, never (and I mean never) be copying and pasting code that you don’t fully understand into a real site. If you buy this book thinking that it’s going to explain everything you need to know about API integration, you will either react as a good developer or a very bad developer. If you react like a good developer, you’ll be inspired by the power you can wield with a few tricks, spend some time getting caught up and understanding every command Dan uses, setup a test area, and come back to implement some of these later when you’re wiser. If you react very, very wrong, you’ll go ahead and start pasting code with very little explanation (unfortunately) into a site that you care about. That’s the end of my rant. I think they should have specified the target audience a little more judiciously, but we will all live another day.

Now that I’ve ranted, I’ll say that the rest of the book delivers for anybody with the right experience (or willingness to read other books for understanding). Like I said, it’s very spotty on when it decides to explain more about any subject, but you really can’t expect much more from a cookbook. The first chapter explains setting up a web server from scratch, multithreaded servers, and some concepts that would probably be best studied elsewhere, but the next half of the book really explains file management, editing in the RTE (rich text editor), and basic work with audio and video in good detail. Part of the dichotomy is that those chapters are well-written and complete, but anybody with the experience to read the last few chapters probably doesn’t need help adding images. For the experienced, though, the last few chapters provide some good code for S3, Flickr, YouTube, OpenOffice, services, automation, and even geolocation.

Overall, I’ll be happy to have it on my bookshelf. I will use it to help generate some ideas, grab the occasional snippet of code, and I’ll be happy. If that’s the book you need and you’ve hacked your way through some real TYPO3 extensions before, I’d probably recommend it. It’s “bookshelf candy” for me: not general enough for my desk, but specific enough be necessary when I need to reach for it. The price seems a little high for 200 pages; but remember that, like most cookbooks, you’re paying for the fact that it’s been collected and compiled. No single chunk is worth much more than a free Google search, but a whole collection is just plain handy. You can check it out on Packt’s website (I get no kickbacks).