Compass Designs .net

I have had a couple of emails this week from people asking me about Joomla book recommendations. Back in 2006 when the first edition of my book on Joomla was published, there were hardly any others around. Its been great to see that over the last 12 months we have seen a lot more published. As an author, its encouraging to see the growth, but even more, I think that the volume and pace of book publication is a pretty good indicator of the health of an open source project.

I thought I'd take a second to do a round up of 16 Joomla titles around right now. I thought I would pull some metrics from Amazon to give you a sense of how much people like the offerings (rather than my own opinions).

Cover	Title	Author	Sales Rank *	Rating **	Reviews **
	Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website	Barrie M. North	6,527	4	77
	Using Joomla: Building Powerful and Efficient Web Sites	Ron Severdia Kenneth Crowder	22,554	5	3
	Joomla! For Dummies	Steve Holzner Nancy Conner	25,554	4	16
	Joomla! Start to Finish: How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Web Site	Jen Kramer	30,551	5	1
	Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5	Hagen Graf	48,105	3.5	9
	Beginning Joomla!	Dan Rahmel	48,165	4.5	44
	Joomla! 1.5 Template Design ***	Tessa Blakeley Silver	48,687	3	6
	Joomla! Bible	Ric Shreves	54,447	3	2
	Beginning Joomla! Web Site Development ***	Cory Webb	79,612	3.5	6
	Joomla! 1.5 Development Cookbook ***	James Kennard	134,376	5	2
	Joomla! E-Commerce with VirtueMart ***	Suhreed Sarkar	207,842	4	1
	Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development ***	Joseph LeBlanc	147,799	4	9
	Joomla!: Visual QuickStart Guide	Marni Derr	407,866	3	10
	Joomla! Web Security ***	Tom Canavan	223,544	3.5	7
	Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development ***	James Kennard	225,522	3	11
	Fundamentals of Joomla! ( DVD Video Training)	Barrie M. North	516,225	4	5

* Sales ranks can jump around A LOT. These numbers will have changed by the time you read this blog post! If you want a quick and easy way to compare books, check out Titlez.com (if anyone knows a way to get data average over a longer period, please let me know!)

** Studies have shown that the first few reviews of a book are always higher than later ones. A good rule of thumb is to consider the number of reviews (i.e. consistency) along with the actual average rating.

*** These books are either ones targeted at programming/development, or ones focused on a specific subject within Joomla. As such, one needs to be careful comparing their rank to the other, more general titles.