Review of Jakub Winkler's book "Mastering Adobe Commerce Frontend"

From end to end

I know Jakub and I know his work in the community. So I was pleased to hear he wrote a book. The book focused heavily on Luma frontending, including topics like XML layout, templating, RequireJS, KnockoutJS and jQuery. And his book does not stop at the basics: Every topic is dived into thoroughly. And with that, I would say that Jakub did a good job describing everything that a Magento frontender would need to know to successfully build Magento projects ... based on Luma.

Just a few pointers on the depth: RequireJS is discussed, including its performance issues. Hence, the story continues to JS bundling, but not just the foolish merge option in the backend, but instead the real-life best practice of using Magepack. In a similar way, the XML layout is not just touched upon briefly, but explained inside out. The list goes on and on.

Adobe Commerce? Not Magento Open Source

There were some eyebrows I was raising while reading. For instance, the book is focused upon Adobe Commerce. Huh, I thought the new Adobe Commerce was called Magento :) And the book doesn't mention Mage-OS, even though Jakub is a contributor to that project as well! I don't consider this a big issue, because anyone who knows the Magento ecosystem, knows that the core of Adobe Commerce, Magento Open Source and Mage-OS is the same. So I guess the decision to name the book after Adobe Commerce instead of Magento was more of a marketing issue.

Likewise, the LESS system was explained properly. But the ugly differentiation between mobile and regular styles (when (@media-common = true)) was not touched upon, even though I always find that that's the hardest part to explain properly. Small point though.

The elephant in the room: No Hyvä

One big surprise though was that Hyvä was not mentioned. Over the past few years, Hyvä has become an important player in the market (and there are other players as well: Breeze and Alokai). None of these alternative frontends are mentioned even in the book. On top of it, Adobe PWA Studio (even though you might consider it is in coma) is not mentioned either, despite the fact that PWA Studio is a better match for Adobe itself than Luma.

I completely understand that the book focuses upon the theme that comes out of the box with Magento. However, newcomers should be thought about the themes that actually are popular in the community. A complete covering of all frontends seems out of scope. A simple mention is definitely missing though.

Overall opinion

I've personally written some books myself and I know that there is always a cut-off: The book needs to be finished in time, you need to decide on what topics to cover and what topics to skip. That seems to case here as well. The book already ended up to be 385 pages. If everything was to be written down that is ever related to Magento frontend it would take ten more books.

Despite the cut-off, the book is filled with knowledge. And some of that knowledge (templating, XML layout, CMS, etc) simply also applies to Hyvä, Breeze and other frontends (built on top of the monolith). With that, the book is a welcome addition to my training bookshelf and I'm eager to advocate the book to anyone who is active with Magento frontending.

Thanks Jakub!