After the review of the book "Joomla! 1.5 Customization" and "Joomla! 1.5 Template Design" published in the previous months, Packt Publishing was so kind to send me a copy  of  "Joomla 1.5 Development Cookbook" to review.

Released in September 2009, this book was written by James Kennard, author of the fabulous book "Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extension and Framework Development", a bible for developers using the Joomla 1.5 platform.

The book is essentially a set of recipes, over 130 quick solutions to practical problems, guides and tips to overcome quickly all the obstacles that you may find during the development of extensions and applications that use the Joomla framework.

After two weeks of reading it, the book is already become a must-have companion during the development and planning sessions.

The first chapter presents recipes that introduce JoomlaCode.org and explain how to setup a GPL project hosted by the Joomla servers.

It continues with quick lessons that illustrate SVN and its basic usage.

The book then flows into real development: security, database, using the session and user management using class JUser, the explanation of how Joomla allows the use of Unicode strings while based on a language (PHP) does not support it fully.

It then goes on to talk about CSS, JavaScript, Mootools, user interaction, metadata, PDF, RSS, MIME.

Really useful is the section on the management of the backend administration, followed by an explanation of how the plugins can be used effectively and how to extend the existing functionality using the class JParameter.

The book ends with three chapters which explain:

• How to use the class JObject and how to work with arrays using class JArrayHelper
• How to handle errors using the static class JError and exceptions
• Working with the local filesystem using JFile, JFolder and JPath

You can find more details on the Packt website and download the sample chapter "Keeping Extensions Secure".

Definitely a book to recommend to any professional and amateur developer!