novusweb Leaders Author Latest Magento 2 Book

Packt Publishing, a leading publisher of books related to open source software and platforms, has released Learning Magento 2 Administration, written by Cyndi and me. The book is now on sale on Packt's website, as well as on Amazon and other online retailers. It is available in both hardcover and digital formats.We're very excited about this book, as we lobbied Packt to create a book that was less technical and more business operations. Packt is very well known for their technical books, but they did step up and support the idea of a book aimed primarily at Magento store owners.

More Than Descriptions

It was also our intent to give more than cursory explanations on the many forms, settings and fields within the backend of the Magento 2 platform. It's one thing to identify the setting for "guest" checkout, yet without understanding the implications or opportunities of enabling or disabling this feature, the store owner can't make an intelligent decision.Throughout the book, we applied our real-world experience in managing e-commerce stores. We hope this adds some value to the reader.

Writing Books is Hard, Fun Work

It takes about four to six months to write a book such as Learning Magento 2 Administration. We write books in our "spare" time, so to speak, as we have a business to run. I suspect that as a full-time writer, the book could have been completed in about two to three months. A positive aspect of writing this type of book is that the "plot" is truly the feature set of the software. In this case, it is the various functional areas of Magento, such as products, orders, themes, etc.The tedious part is creating screen captures and documenting in excruciating detail the steps of a process. Consider this excerpt from Chapter 8 describing how to create a promotional discount:

Our first condition will test whether the customer has $100 or more of women’s tops in their shopping cart.

1. Click the green + icon to create your first condition.
2. In the dropdown, choose Products subselection. We are creating a rule that will apply to only a particular selection of qualifying products.
3. Click on the words total quantity is and select total amount.
4. Click the word is and select equals or greater than.
5. Click the following ellipsis (…) and enter 100. Hit your enter key.
6. Change ALL to ANY in the condition description.
7. Click the green + icon nested within this condition.
8. Select Category from the dropdown menu.
9. Click is and select is one of from the dropdown menu.
10. Click the following ellipsis (…), and either using the list icon or by typing the category IDs of the categories you wish to use, choose the Tops category and all sub-categories within.
11. Once you have selected your categories, click the green checkmark icon to save your choices.
12. Next, we need to add the “or” condition that tests whether the customer has 3 or more women’s apparel items into their cart.
13. Click the left-most green + icon.
14. Select Products subselection in the resulting dropdown.
15. Select equals or greater than for the comparison value.
16. Enter 3 for the amount.
17. Change ALL to ANY in the condition description.
18. Click the nested green + icon.
19. Select Category from the dropdown.
20. Click is and select is one of from the dropdown choices.
21. Click the ellipsis (…) and select all categories within the women’s apparel section.
22. Click Save and Continue Edit to save your work to this point.

Whew. Reading that now explains why my caffeine addiction is now at an all-time high. Creating this level of instruction detail means we had to try, test and verify that these steps would indeed work. And in this book there are hundreds of guides provided.Some might consider this as boring, thankless work. We do not. You simply have to receive that one email where a reader thanks you for solving a nagging issue or inspiring them in a creative way they had not previously considered.

Not Our First Book Gig

My first book was a self-published book focused on managing multiple stores in Magento. We sold it on our own site for about $5 and sold thousands over the few years it was posted. In 2012, Packt published my Mastering Magento which — so I'm told — has been one of their top sellers.This year, not only is Learning Magento 2 Administration out, but very soon Mastering Magento 2 will be released (it's already on pre-sale on Packt's website). I've had the privilege of having Jon Bownds of Praxis Information Science as co-author, as he is truly chin-deep on the technical aspects of Magento 2.