Modx: The Official Guide [Paperback]

My biggest complaint with this book is its size: this is an over-sized volume and at almost 800 pages it's pretty heavy; it's nearly impossible to hold comfortably in one hand.

The author gushes about Modx in the intro chapter...that's more comforting than starting the book by saying "this product sucks" but it serves to warn that the author is a tad partial.

All-in-all, this is a really good book. The author addresses pretty much all of the issues that you need to know to develop a site with Modx and does so at a level that seems appropriate to most or all audiences. I do think you'd benefit by installing Modx and playing with it for a day or so before tackling the book...the book gave me many "aha!" moments when reading because I had already struggled with so many of the concepts. The author introduces liberal doses of "here-is-how-I-would-do-it" in the book and these are very appreciated; they serve to underscore areas and concepts that aren't necessarily intuitive.

Modx is a great Web development framework with many CMS-like features but there are powerful constructs and concepts that are really difficult for the newcomer to fully grasp. For example, a "site context" was something that I was sure was important but had no idea why. In a few quick paragraphs, the book showed me the power and the potential of site contexts within the first 30 pages or so. I had spent two hours trying to figure out how to do a certain task un-cached and was utterly defeated. The author solved the problem with a simple operator ([[!...). Duh.

Modx comes in two flavors: Evolution and Revolution. It appears to me that Revolution (essentially, Modx 2+) is a rework of the original framework where the developers decided to bite the bullet and throw out the bad ideas. To the Modx newbie, the differences between the two products aren't apparent at first and yet they are critical to know because it is easy to start researching a problem and heading off in a wrong direction because you have inadvertently stumbled across an Evolution discussion.

I recommend circling some passages with a pen or pencil and dog-earing the pages to come back to them. As I read sections of the book, my instinct was to go try some of the ideas presented but I think you're better off reading through most of the book skimming over sections that aren't immediately important. Then, go back and review those pages that contained valuable nuggets of code or procedures.

I've written a number of programming books and know how big of a job an undertaking of this scope is. Kudos to Bob Ray and his co-authors for a definitive work.

I am not a professional web site developper.

I have developped and maintain a dynamic web site(with PHP and MySql) for my hobby interest though. This site is more than a simple blog site and run on MODX.

When I started using MODX, I had a good understanding of HTML and CSS. I also had a working knowledge of JavaScript but no knowledge of PHP. There was a good series of modX site creation instructions on the coding pad blog (just google with "coding pad modx tutorial".) I gained most of working knowledge on MODX from this internet resource. The said tutorial get you going on constructing a database driven web site in relatively short time. Note that I also evaluated Joomla and Drupal at the same time, loaded them on the server and tried them out. In the end I chose MODX over them, mainly it allowed a direct transition from html based web site to dynamic web site. Other systems force you to set up the site their way. With MODX, I did not need to rewrite my html markup, my menu structure and/or my thought process. Infinite amount of fine tuning as to how the web site should look is possible with MODX.

During the course I started to learn PHP to appreciate the power of MODX. Thanks to my knowledge with JavaScript, learning PHP was not difficult. What was difficult was the way MODX let you utilize PHP in "MODX way"

I bought Bob's book the moment it came out. Aside from usual stuff that tells you how to build website without any coding, the most strong point of his book is about how you can vastly improve your site with a little PHP coding and let the MODX engine (with APIs that you can tap) take care of otherwise hard programming exercise.

This is a thick book. You need to skim through the book and get a feeling of what is available inside. Then while you are working on creating a site, and have some questions, you can go to the excellent table of index at the back and find a topic, read them through and apply to your project.

Case in point. Recently I needed a method to dynamically insert a CSS file at the <head> section of particular pages. I remember seeing modx->regClientCSS in the online MODX page, but there was not much of an information other than the mention this can insert a CSS file. Enter Bob's book. Here is what is shown in this entry.

reg* - The following five methods insert CSS,JS, or HTML at various points of a document. In all cases, the script is registered with MODX so that it won't be injected more than once. Multiple scripts are injected in the order in which they are reigstered.
regClientCSS(string $src) - Places the string just above the closing </head> taf of the document. If $src contains '<link'or '<style', it will be insereted a writttn. Otherwise it will be wrapped as follows;
'<link rel="stylesheet" href="'. $src . '" type="text/css:" >'

This chunk of information turned out to be the exact information that I wanted to know. In another word;
1) Multiple calls to this method will not result in multiple references to the same CSS. the function takes care of itself as "required once"
and
2) parameter can be not only a file path but also a string that actually contains style tag and attributes "<style>..</style>"

I could have eventually gain this knowledge by googling Internet I am sure. but it could cost me half an hour or more.

The book is packed with this type of information. I constantly going back to the book when I am working on the site. Indispensable.

If you use modx, this book is probably the best resource money can buy at the moment.
I definitely recommend this