osCommerce

Deep Inside osCommerce - The Cookbook

After reading a few Packt books, which I really liked, I was looking forward to reading a new book on osCommerce. This one is Deep Inside osCommerce - The Cookbook.

The first thing I noticed was the price $49.99 which is too steep according to me. (Disclosure: I got a review copy FREE, but that won't change my opinion.) Personally I would not spend that kind of money (at least for a technology book) unless I wanted to keep it in my personal library for a long time.

Anyway, I am feeling so hungry looking at this cookbook, let me start the review immediately.

The book is arranged in the form of different recipes. Each recipe has presentation section, ingredients section and cooking section. Unfortunately a lot of recipes turn out to be just appetizers. There are very few good recipes.

Open Source: 

osCommerce Book review

I started working on osCommerce about 2 years ago. I was a newbie and wanted to learn about osCommerce quickly. So I searched the net and was happy to find Kerry Watson's "osCommerce Technical Manual" on eBay, although it is also available on http://www.oscommercemanuals.com/ website.

However, the happiness did not last long. It is one of the worst books I have ever read. Although it was supposed to be a "Technical" manual, I feel that it is written for store data entry clerks and is totally worthless. I could get much better information on osCommerce forums. Also, the eBook was difficult to read.

That's why, I was a little hesitant about quality of contents when I started reading David Mercer's book published by Packt Publishing. I had already read Packt's book about Smarty and liked it, so I decided to get this one about osCommerce. The moment I started browsing the book, I could not keep it down. It is such a fabulous book that I wished it should have been available for me 2 years ago.

Ok. Let's start review of Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition by David Mercer.

Technology: 
Open Source: 

Essential Add-on Modules for osCommerce

osCommerce is an excellent GPL solution for your shooping cart needs. However, the current stable version MS2.2 does not have a lot of features that are useful for a store owner. Also, there may be several versions for a "contribution" and at times, it is difficult to find a "stable" version.

Below is a list of contributions that are tested by me personally and work fine. Hopefully, this list will be helpful for you if you are not sure which contributions are really nice and which do work.

  • All Products Page
  • All Manufacturers
  • Customer Registration Report
  • Froogle feed
  • Credit Class & Gift Voucher
  • Easy Populate
  • Header Tags Controller
  • How did you hear about us (v1.4)
  • Purchase Without Account
  • YASU (I suggest that you use next contribution by Chemo)
  • SEO by Chemo (Ultimate SEO URLs v2.1c)
  • Visitor Web Stats
  • Quick Price Updates 2.5b
  • Featured Products
  • PDF Katalog products PDF reports
  • Recover Cart Sales
  • MS2 HTML WYSIWYG Editor for Product Desc, Email + v1.7
  • Sales Report
  • Margin Report
  • Monthly Sales/Tax Report v2.1.1c
  • Low Stock Report 2.MS2.rev0
  • Master Password MPV1.3
  • MSRP
  • Sort Customers in Admin
  • Open Source: