Most "introductory" materials for open source CMS/blog platform products are written for a hypothetical user somewhere--in terms of experience level--between a professional programmer and someone's imaginary grandmother who just learned to use "The Google" last week: Someone who's comfortable using FTP and decompressing ZIP files and who has at least some idea of what HTML is.

For some reason, the introductory Joomla! documentation I've seen all seems to be written for Grandma. This book is no exception: Page after page is used explaining what the web is, how a CMS is different from just using a bunch of flat HTML files, how to use FTP, and how to make Web-safe graphics. Screenshots of each page in the administrative interface are discussed ad nauseam. The single chapter on writing templates for Joomla! barely has time to discuss what goes into writing a template after explaining how to download, unzip, install and use GIMP to create graphics--the result definitely isn't adequate to explain how to make a Joomla!-based website look and act the way you want it to.

If you need help with basic web skills, I'd recommend Robin Williams and John Tollett's Non-Designer's Web Book rather than this volume. If there's a book available that actually discusses Joomla! itself in depth, I'm open to recommendations. ( )

Information is a lot more structured than the Joomla/Mambo book by Graf. This book is primarily for Joomla 1.5, but has some information on Joomla 1.0 where the technique used in the older software is different. ( )