This review was written by Adrian Rosian specially for "Packt Publishing". The book you can find on thier offilial website here.

I was honored and glad when the prestigious publisher "Packt Publishing" asked me to review one of their books about template design for the popular CMS Joomla! This was even more flattering because I started my early development in Joomla! with another one of their books.
Receiving a copy of the book, I enthusiastically dove into its contents, excited to discover someone else's view on this CMS to which I so easily got attached.

From the title we can see that the author takes the long road of a quasi-exhaustive approach to this subject, beginning with the small steps to create a basic Joomla 1.5 template and continuing with more advanced techniques like using Ajax and personalizing the template with the aid of parameters. The very important steps of deciding which approach is best when enrolling for the template design task are included in the introductory chapter, along with tools and skills necessary to successfully complete this mission. We find out that the book is geared towards web designers who have knowledge of css, xhtml and an understanding on how server-side scripts work.

The author then develops the subject by introducing us to the Joomla! specifics and by pointing out a good path to follow similar to rapid prototyping which she developed out of her own experience to help shorten the process of client-provider communication during the design process, thus leading to a more effective and efficient way to finish a Joomla! template design project.

All the phases of classical design are included in the book, adapted to the Joomla! framework. We are delighted to see that the author lists all Joomla! specific css id's and classes necessary to style the entire Joomla! interface, as well as very good usage guidelines for the great feature called template overrides. Advanced techniques like collapsible module positions are also covered.

Although adding JavaScript to the template and adding Ajax functionality in Joomla! is well covered and correctly, we cannot help notice there is a bit of clumsiness in the author's approach to this part, due, perhaps, to the web design background, resulting in a not very elegant code. Thus, we notice that the scripts are added to the template as tags instead of using the static method of the factory class to get the document and add the script via the consecrated method. As a personal preference, I also noticed the less elegant getElementById in place of using the Mootools library to add events to the window object, as a nonintrusive approach. However, the author's approach is good as a common denominator for minimal http requests. For the AJAX part, also as a personal preference, I would have opted for the Mootools library instead of jQuery to avoid potential conflicts with core functionality if any of the components or modules used by the site would have utilised the core Mootools library (a very common usage being the panels, which are very easy to implement using the Joomla! Framework).

The last chapter, dedicated to tips and tricks to enhance user experience describes some more advanced techniques and completes this well written book. I would notice here the final notes on SEO, which complete the semantic approach to coding the template followed by the author in the coding section. The reading experience is a good one, the logical flow is smooth and involving, the illustrations are well placed and to the point. As an overall impression, the book is a comprehensive guide to creating Joomla! 1.5 templates and a must have for busy web designers who don't have the necessary time to gather the information from the sometimes scarce documentation articles.