Getting Started with OpenCart Module Development

OpenCart is a very good e-commerce software written in the famous PHP language.It comes with a lot of features, it's free and open source, it's quick to deploy and to customize, it's relatively bug free, much cheaper to install, support and learn than blasoned competitors like Magento.It's the indie and small software house dream come true.OpenCart's major drawback is the scarce, terse and usually obsolete documentation. It's a real pain to create a "module" / extension / plug-in / add-on (yeah these things take many names!), one has to sit down, study a lot of old code and figure out how to implement their changes or their extensions.This book comes in to help the "software practicioneer". I am using this definition because I think it really describes the book in a nutshell.If you want to understand OpenCart in depth, if you want to explore it's inner design model, then you'll probably find little in this book.But if you need the job done, if you have contracted an extension and the clock is ticking, then this book could help you a lot.The big boon is, the book is updated to the latest OpenCart release and this is not a minor detail.It's also written in a simple, practical English, thus international developers (a major portion of OpenCart's developers community) will easily understand the book contents.Moreover, it takes a gradual approach. While it stays quite terse at explaining why a certain OpenCart feature works in a certain way, it shows you the code to implement a certain task. The first task is easy, the subsequent chapters show more and more advanced modules. The author does not spare you any nitty gritty details, so you are presented both with "functional" code and the boilerplate code OpenCart requires to include in its add ons. It goes a bit farter than the title says, it's not just a "Getting Started" but also a "Getting Done".At the end of the book, you will be able to create a quite advanced add on, even if you might not really know why it's been written in that way.Therefore I suggest this book to the seasoned or practitioneer PHP programmer. The former may understand how the whole mechanism works by reading at the provided, relatively simple code, the latter does not even truly want to understand everything, he's focused at getting the job done.To sum it up:Good:- Updated to the latest OpenCart release.- Gets quickly down to the code, without long theory sessions.- The provided code may directly be used almost as-is or extended for your own module.Less good:- It could have detailed a bit more about the design decisions and about how OpenCart works.- The learning curve is short but could be steep for a PHP beginner.

Not very impressed with this - book? 95 pages (3 chapters) of do this do that instructions about cloning and modifying opencart modules. Most developers would get further than this under their own steam. Written in very poor English. Not much to say other than very few potatoes and no meat!