As mentioned a while ago in another blogpost of
mine,
I received a copy of a Typo3 book for reviewing. Tons of time has passed
and I have now finally managed to do the review (yes, I know, it's a
month and half late ... or more). Anyway ... on to the reading.
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.