I'm proud to present you my second book

In the early stages of Joomla, right after the Mambo fork and during the ages of Joomla 1.5 Alpha 1, the idea came up to write a book on this fresh new CMS: Because I wrote a bunch of tutorials and coursematerials before that, I decided to pick up on this task and focus on Joomla theming: After months of hard work, a Dutch book on learning Joomla template development was released. It was a great success, limited to The Netherlands though.

Now, about 7 years later, I'm proud to present you with a new book, my second book: This time written in English and available to the entire Joomla community across the globe. And the topic is Joomla plugins. Wait, just plugins?

One book only on Joomla plugins?

Yes, just plugins. Over the past 7 years, numerous books have been written on Joomla and when considering a new book, I knew right away that another generic piece of literature would not make a difference. I needed a niche market, a specific area to focus on. Because Joomla development has really become my thing, it needed to be about coding too. But writing a book on Joomla development as a whole was still to generic for me as well.

Then it hit me: There are dozens book on Joomla programming already, but all of them discuss Joomla plugins in a few pages, 20-30 pages max. What if I wrote a book on just plugins? And not just discuss the general things, but discuss every event in detail: To give you the entire overview of everything that you would ever want to do with plugins.

So I started off writing in early 2013. I had some other things to do mid 2013 (like starting an entirely new business and then quitting that new job again) and picked up on the writing early 2014 again. I started off with the concept of writing a book of about 150 pages. When finishing a draft version with most of the core events dealt with, I was at 200 pages and I was not done yet.

Not just plugins, but plugins in-to-depth

I kept on writing. From a general discussion of how to create plugins for various use cases, I also went ahead with writing pages on examples that were plain stupid from a practical point of view, but very useful from an educational point of view: For instance, writing an entire plugin that duplicated the functionality of Two Factor Authentication, but actually not using Two Factor Authentication for that. Very interesting stuff!

On I went, dealing with Sphinx search functionality, writing PHPUnit tests for plugins, extending JForms the proper way with all exceptions dealt with, error handling, code beautification, XML and extension updates, subscription models, design patterns and coding practices. See the book index for an overview.

So there it is: 368 pages

When I finished, the book reached a whopping page number of 368. The writing part finished and I thought I could take a rest. Not. Because I decided to publish the book entirely under the Yireo brand, there was still a long road ahead to get the books on the book shelf: The design was done by my dude Ruben Creemers. My girlfriend helped me with text reviewing and setting up the distribution. And I assembled an awesome team of Joomla expert reviewers who helped me finetune the bits of the book. 

Self publishing also means getting the right quote for a printing job (the first release includes 4000 copies); getting the design ready for print; deciding which channels to use for distribution; signing contracts with various distribution partners; shipping books overseas and dealing with customs (especially US customs). This caused numerous of stress moments, for the major part because I'm a simple Dutch boy who doesn't didn't understand a bit of the publishing industry.

Conclusion

All in all, I really believe it was worth the ride. The book is out now and for sale on various channels, including Amazon (US) and our Yireo Shop (Europe). In our upcoming blogs, we hope to share some of our experiences with self-publishing with you. And about the book: We are just damn proud of it. The end-result is a great looking book. If you consider buying it, we assure you that the content is just as interesting as the outside seems to suggest! Checkout the free preview chapter in our downloads section.

If you have any question, don't hesitate to contact us through mail (info@yireo.com) or twitter (@yireo).