The book is a collection of recipes for how to do the various tasks you’ll need to do to get a site going using Plone 3 – typical cookbook style. It’s laid out in project-form: the authors stipulate a project (the design of a digital newspaper website with some particular requirements) and then go through the tasks for the project one by one in the form of recipes. The style is the same as in the previous Packt review I did: each chapter focuses on one particular concept, comprising a number of recipes, with each recipe containing an introduction, How to do it section, How it works, suggestions for further research/reading plus a cross-reference with recipes.

The book

The book is done in black and white (that includes all illustrations) and like the Typo3 book it suffers a bit from this, especially because the printing is too rough. You’ll notice this with the images in the book – luckily there are only a few, otherwise it would have been more annoying to look at.

Mentioning illustrations, one of the slightly confusing points in the book is how some illustrations don’t quite show what you want or need from them. Most of the time they are located in the How to do it section of a recipe and you will expect it to show how to do a specific step, but you’ll find it shows something less useful, like the page you need to be working on (not in itself bad but you’ll know that already from the recipe anyway).

One personal gripe I have with the book is a recurring theme of mine: the “download the code, we won’t print it”-approach. I mentioned this in the Typo3 book review as well and it’s still annoying to me. An example of why: I’m writing part of this review in an airport and there are certain parts I can’t test because I cannot download the code (no, I’m not paying the absurd prices of airport-wifi. It’s a market and I choose to show the idiots that their product is priced insanely high by not buying it).

Apart from that, the structure of the book makes it nice and easy to get into: the recipes make it easy to learn and the themed structure means reading you proceed quite naturally from topic to topic.

The recipes

You’ll start at the very beginning with this book: installing python and Plone. This actually works quite well given the aim of the book: to build a site with certain characteristics and get it running. One recipe that is quite handy is how to install python 2.4: Plone 3 doesn’t run on newer versions of python, so without this you’d be googling for a reliable solution to the problem before being able to dig into the real problem.

The recipes are typically ok explained. You obviously won’t know everything related to creating Plone 3 sites after using the book but you’ll have a good starting point and will be able to put a number of things in place. It should be noted, though, that the book focuses on creating Plone 3 packages (i.e. plugins) so you won’t find recipes on how to design a site in Plone 3.

However, some recipes skip too fast ahead – for instance, one of the last recipes revolves around creating a production-site buildout so you can easily push the final site live. In this recipe you’ll find a lot of interesting tools mentioned, such as Varnish – but there’s little to no info about these tools or how to best use them with Plone 3. Here, you can likely argue that it would be outside the scope of the book (it focuses on Plone 3 products, not other stuff) but that doesn’t remove the feeling that the book was either cut a bit short, published too early or that the recipe is simply meant as a teaser. Whatever the reason, it’s annoying.

One aspect that I find particularly nice is the focus in recipes on testing. A couple of recipes are fully devoted to testing and apart from that most if not all recipes dealing with code also include code for testing. That gives you the chance to start a good habit, as well as a chance for catching errors or typos in the recipes: in case something doesn’t work quite perfectly, the tests provide further options for debugging.

Another aspect I find positive is that the recipes introduce a lot of tools and options: if you manage to read them all, you’ll have quite a few tools to work with when constructing a Plone 3 site. For instance, the authors introduce you to Dexterity, a content type framework not yet in stable version when the book was published – so, you’ll find just one recipe using it, showing how product development might look in the future without spending too many resources on something that might be radically different tomorrow. This is the sort of teaser I’m happy to see, as opposed to the inclusion of various tools with half a line used to explain each (read: the recipe including Varnish).

Conclusion

The book has a few flaws – it feels as though too little attention was paid to the final product feel (illustrations, recipes feeling shortened) – but overall it seems informative. As a Plone beginner myself, this book gives me a good basis to work from. On the other hand, I doubt that experienced Plone 3 developers will get that much out of the book – however, because it’s a cookbook, even developers with some Plone 3 experience might gain something from it as a reference-book.

If you’re interested in getting started with Plone 3 development, this book is not a bad place to start. Personally, I’m not sure the Plone way is my way: it seems to suffer from the typical problem of “let’s make a million tools to make Plone development easier” – if you need a tool to make development in the CMS easier, then a) your CMS has problems of it’s own to start with and b) you had better make sure the tools created to alleviate the problem really work well and don’t have problematic or annoying shortcomings, as you’re putting another obstacle in the way of the developer (not only do I have to learn Plone 3, now I also have to learn how to use your tool. If I also have to learn how to fix the problems created by your tool, I’ve not gained anything, I’ve just lost time). Having said that, I’ll also note that this cookbook has actually given me the motivation to try out the CMS: something in the books favor, I’m sure.

With a bit of luck, I should have the book in two weeks and knowing my schedule it’ll be between three and four weeks after that before the review is on the site here.

Introduction

The book I’m reviewing here is TYPO3 4.3 Multimedia Cookbook by Dan Osipov, published by Packt Publishing. The title gives you a good idea as to the content but if you were in doubt, the sub title spells it out: ”Over 50 great recipes for effectively managing multimedia content to create an organized website in TYPO3”. The aim of the book is thus to help you take care of the more or less typical problems connected with handling multimedia in Typo3, by giving you step-by-step recipes for putting solutions in place. How well the book achieves that is what I’ll be looking at here.

The book

Before I dive into the recipes, there are a two general points to make. First, for a book about multimedia, it unfortunately comes across a bit lacking: the images in the book (of which there are a few) are consistently too dark. It might have been a tradeoff to make sure the graphics stands out better, but it just doesn’t look good and hence gives the book a slightly unfinished or rushed feel.

Another thing to note is the approach to code sections the author has taken. A book like this could easily fill up most of it’s pages with code, leading either to a very large book or very short descriptions. The approach chosen here is another: most of the recipes that involve code of some size direct you to download the appropriate code, after which the most important parts are explained. Whether you see this as a positive thing or not depends mainly on taste, I suppose – personally I prefer being able to look at all the code that makes up a given recipe, instead of having to move to another media to get an overview.

The recipes

The book is divided into eight categories: Getting Started, Managing Digital Assets, Operating with Metadata in Media Files, Rendering Images, Rendering Video and Audio, Connecting to External APIs, Creating Services, and Automating Processes. As should be obvious given the list, it’s covering a lot of different situations, which is both positive and negative. It’s great because it gives the book a lot of diversity and you’re almost certain to get inspired by some of the recipes – too much ground is covered for there not to be something interesting for everyone.

However, among all the things the book covers you’ll also find things that seem irrelevant to the topic. For instance, the first chapter has a total of eight recipes – only three of these actually deal with Typo3. The rest are short recipes on how to setup a web server or an NFS share – not exactly everyday topics when running your Typo3 site. The three recipes that do deal with Typo3 focus on setting Typo3 up and creating a template – again, not something you’re likely to be looking for when you’re having multimedia problems. It seems as though the first chapter aims to create a common ground, so the Typo3 newbie can join the party as well – but that’s not the premise of the book. The second chapter is better but also has some chapters that suffer from this. The third chapter is a mix: two recipes explain how to set metadata in image and audio files using tools like Photoshop, while the rest explain how you can extract the data in Typo3. After that, the rest of the book is on topic.

That’s about the negative I have to note about the book – the rest is positive. The remaining recipes range from ”Good to know” or ”I can use that” to ”Hey, that’s pretty cool!”. The chapters on rendering images and audio/videofall into the first category, while the last three chapters (Connecting to External APIs, Creating Services and Automating Processes) are in the latter. For instance, the recipes on using Amazons S3 services are pretty nifty as are the recipes on creating services (especially the detailed walkthrough of how to convert audio using a service).

Overall, the recipes are well written up: they all follow the same useful layout (preparation, step-by-step guide, explanation, further points, references to other recipes) which helps you grasp the information quicker, the language is easy to dig into, and the recipes contain helpful screenshots of interfaces you’ll be dealing with (one of the things that might otherwise overwhelm you). As pointed out, most of the recipes do not include all of the code needed for functionality but they do explain the key points and they use enough space to make sure you understand what’s going on – which makes it a fair chance you’ll be able to use what you learn in other contexts.

Conclusion

I was happy to receive a copy of the Multimedia Cookbook to review: after reading it, I think it’s a good guide to multimedia issues and I’m pretty sure I’ll be using some of the recipes. As such, it’s given me some practical hints on how to do things. It’s also given me a better insight into some things Typo3 though, which is another bonus from reading it. I would expect the payoff for experienced Typo3 developers to be less on both accounts, but I still imagine it would be an ok addition to the library, as the cookbook layout makes it ideal for reading whenever you come across a specific multimedia related problem.

That said, it’s not the best handbook I’ve even com across – the problems mentioned (irrelevant recipes and minor layout problems) coupled with the ”get the code online then return to the book”-approach subtract somewhat from it, unfortunately. I still think it’s a good guide though and have no trouble recommending it. So if you’re wondering how to handle multimedia in Typo3 or just feel like expanding your Typo knowledge, I’d say give it a read.

The book gives you a step-by-step process for organizing an effective multimedia system. It also gives solutions to commonly encountered problems, and offers a variety of tools for dealing with multimedia content.

There’ll be a minor delay before the review goes online, though, as I’m off on holidays next week for two weeks – so I expect I’ll be done with the review start March or so. Come back for more reading then :)