Review: A more technical perspective

Alan Berg at Free Software Magazine writes a more techy review than I've previously seen.

Impressively practical and accurate, this books 250 pages of straightforward and easy to understand text is another effective book from the PACKT publishing stable. Rice writes in such a way that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to follow along and create an interactive website and fill it with content.

And...

William Rice has written a clear explanation of the core details required to get a working instance of Moodle off the ground with solid course content backing. I particularly like the fact that it has so many screen grabs, making the walkthroughs transparent and obvious, even to me.

A lot of the review discusses the book from the point of view of an open source advocate and expert. If you're more technically minded (embracing rather than running from terms like PHP, programming, and Apache), this review might push your buttons.

Review: "Packt's Moodle is a fantastic resource, although the title is a bit misleading..."

Another review, this time from the E-Learning Queen. Key quotes:

I would imagine that every institution that is using Moodle (or considering it) will want to buy a copy of this manual for every person on their tech team.

And...

Packt's Moodle is a fantastic resource, although the title is a bit misleading. It is, in reality, a technical manual for using Moodle. It has very little to say about e-learning, except in the sense that it is implicit that learning via Moodle is e-learning.

Thanks for the kind words your majesty!

William and I wanted to develop a book that acted as a technical manual and also provided e-learning advice. There are posts on Moodle.org that suggest we got this right for some readers. I guess the e-learning theory was pretty basic for an e-learning specialist, and the review contains great ideas for follow ups:

... it does not include any elements of instructional design that would allow a user to start developing courses that are pedagogically sound in terms of commonly accepted best practices for e-learning. Further, it does not contain templates for typical courses, which would also be quite valuable for institutions that would be most likely to be interested in open-source learning management systems.

Review: "All in all ... a great reference"

David at OpenSourceSchools.org posts a review of our book. It's great as an editor to hear positive reviews of books that I've worked on, even though the ultimate credit has to go to the author.

David also makes a suggestion for an improvement / addition to the existing material:

While this book provides an excellent description of what the tools are and how to use them, something that I think would be complimentary to this would be a guide that provides example courses and objectives, and steps the user through building that course through a tutorial.

Watch this space David. I'm looking for ways to both improve the existing Moodle book for 2.0, and develop new Moodle books that specialize in different areas. Do you have burning desires for future Moodle titles? What do you want to see? Comment below...