About the Authors
Robbert Ravensbergen is an open source and e-commerce expert from the Netherlands. He started to work with open source solutions in the early days of Joomla!. He started his own company, joomblocks.com, from which he has been serving clients with open source solutions since 2009.
His first book about WordPress, Kickstart WordPress , Pearson Education , was released in the Netherlands in 2010. After that, several open source related books on Joomla!, Magento, and again WordPress followed. The second edition of Magento Beginner's Guide is his first international book.
Sander Schoneville is a Technical Director at GroupDeal, a Dutch daily deals site based on Magento. His has his background set in media psychology and business informatics. He combines both fields to create effective websites.
He has worked with Magento since its early releases in 2008 and has written a Dutch book about Magento.
Together with co-writer Robbert Ravensbergen, he's running an e-commerce blog at http://www.boostingecommerce.com.
About the Reviewers
Eugene Ivashin was born in Russia and currently resides in Kiev, Ukraine.
He graduated from Dnepr State Academy of Building and Architecture in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine and got a diploma with distinction as a Building Industry Automation Engineer in 1997.
He has since worked at South Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant as a repair engineer (six and half years) and got interested in web development at that time. By the end of 2003, Eugene left SU NPP, headed to Kiev and became a web programmer in a small private web design agency where he spent more than 2 years building websites for various customers and growing into a project manager in the process. At the same time, he continued freelancing for separate customers and participating in a few sole proprietorship companies in the area of web development and services. From April 2008, Eugene worked as a web developer and a technical support at ExpoPromoter, a company leading in the tradeshow industry, providing for a large catalog of tradeshow organizers across the world.
Finally, in January 2010, Eugene entered Varien Inc., which was later on rebranded as Magento Inc., as a software engineer, but lately became a Technical Trainer. When Magento was acquired by X.commerce, an eBay company, in August 2011, Eugene became a training manager responsible for providing technical knowledge for all X.commerce employees.
Eugene speaks Russian, Ukrainian, and English. He likes to read science fiction books, admire fine arts, and loves to draw pictures in particular by himself.
Karen Kilroy is a freelance e-commerce web developer focused on the Magento Community and Enterprise implementations and theming. Karen has worked as a frontend and backend developer on a variety of Magento projects since early 2009. She is an enthusiastic instructor and developer who enjoys experimenting with HTML5, CSS3, and responsive web designs. She is also an instructor and course author for Magento U. Additionally, Karen is the sole inventor of an e-commerce process called Shared Shopping (United States Patent Pending 13/350,321).
Prior to working with Magento, Karen worked with a wide variety of web and other technologies during her more than 25 years' information technology career. In her spare time, Karen volunteers as head coach of the Dragon Dream Team, an all-breast cancer survivor dragon boat racing crew.
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Preface
It was a few years ago, I think it was somewhere in 2008, when I first heard about Magento as the new ''Top open source e-commerce solution''. Actually, at that moment it wasn't yet that good, but I could see the potential of the software already. Especially thinking about other open source solutions such as osCommerce at that time, or VirtueMart running on Joomla. No, those were the days when the e-commerce market was still dominated by large-scale companies and expensive solutions, but things have rapidly changed since then.
During 2009, the first edition of this book was published by Packt, written by William Rice. And at that moment it was actually one of the very first books in the market giving readers the opportunity to learn to work with Magento. Also in that area, times have changed and various new versions of Magento have been released since then. So it's time for a completely updated and rewritten version of that first, popular Magento book. And here it is.