Alfresco 3 Cookbook: Over 70 recipes for implementing the most important functionalities of Alfresco

I am a fan of the Cookbook format. It is a quick way to learn a subject / product and helps us to get hands on immediately. Alfresco especially, being a complex product with diverse features is learned quickly in this format. There is also a tendency for authors to misuse this format by missing out concepts behind the quick hands on steps. I would like to congratulate the author, Snig Bhaumik, for making excellent use of this format without sacrificing the conceptual information.The book covers version 3.3 of Alfresco. Topics covered include installation, content organization, Alfresco Explorer (for old timers: new name of Web Client), Search, Rules, Web Scripts and Workflows. Among the third-party product-integration covered are MS Outlook and MS Office. There is also a dedicated chapter on configuring Alfresco to send and receive emails, and exposing Alfresco contents using other protocols like FTP and CIFS. As you see, the book covers quite some features of the product. The author uses relevant screenshots and numbered steps to explain configuration and development. Also, the examples chosen by the author are simple and explain the topic in surprisingly concise manner. There is also a section on building Alfresco, which I found to be an odd inclusion in this book: the book did not cover anything about Java-based development, and I found this to be irrelevant to the context of the book.To those who has not seen the TOC of the book, the scope of this book does not cover:=> Alfresco Share: The book has a section on Share. The author also informs the reader about the possibility of Share replacing Alfresco Explorer in future. Personally, for this one reason, I would have loved to know more about Share. If there is a future edition of this book, I would love to see extensive coverage of this module.=> Alfresco Web Content Management (WCM): There seems to be some uncertainity about WCM. And the book does not cover this topic.=> Java based extensions: The book does a good job of explaining Web Scripts and Workflows, but does not explain extending them with Java---the examples are with JavaScript.=> The Workflow chapter does a very good job of explaining jBPM based Workflow. But there is no mention of Activiti, and new preferred Workflow engine for Alfresco.Some of these omissions I agree with author not being in the scope of the book (like Java-based-extension and WCM), but I would have loved to more coverage of Share.Now to the editorial drawbacks (which mires most of the Packt books I have read). There are couple of places where it is mentioned that Web Client is now named Alfresco Explorer, but we have a chapter whose name has Web Client. In page 133, a section is full of annotations the author had made for filling in content later (with text like "please give reference to future workflow section here"). Hope Packt does some improvement in this area.Overall, I gave this book a rating of 4 stars. The book really succeeds in explaining the concepts it covers very effectively. I would say, this book along with the bit dated Alfresco Developer Guide is among the best books on Alfresco. I also sincerely hope that the author keeps updating the book along with new versions of Alfresco.

If you are a first time Alfresco developer and have not read many books on Alfresco, Snig's cookbook is an excellent reference. If you have read other Alfresco books, about half the material will be familiar and is what you would typically find in Alfresco tutorial. If you have already implemented several Alfresco applications, go directly to the workflow chapter; you probably already know the solutions/sample code presented in the rest of the cookbook.The other reviews about this book cover the technical details. I would like to high-light Snig's writing style of "providing minimum theory...maximum action". Snig approach to presenting problems to solve and solutions/sample code to solve involves the following:1) Getting Ready (intro to the problem)2) How to do it (instructions/solution overview)3) How it works (technical explanation of the solution)4) There's more (optional supplemental info).Sample code is great for users who are not interested in learning to build Alfresco solutions. Snig's "How it works" section presents the secret sauce on what the sample code does and how it solves the problem. I strongly believe that explaining how to solve the problem is more valuable than the actual solution itself. Snig does a good job of explaining the solutions he presents throughout the book.I would recommend this book to someone who was asked to start building a prototype tomorrow. If you are planning to learn Alfresco as profession, there are other books about Alfresco that cover the theory in more detail.

Alfresco 3 Cookbook (Packt, 2011) is the latest in a series of books on Alfresco ECM that Packt Publishing has released since 2008. Snig Bhaumik, the Technical Director of InfoAxon Technologies Ltd., wrote the book to give software developers wanting to work with Alfresco a comprehensive selection of development recipes covering everything from installing Alfresco in Windows and Linux to compiling Alfresco from source code. The book comes in at 380 pages (and fourteen chapters) and can be purchased in paper and electronic format (PDF and ePub) online or in stores.Chapters One through Five explain how to download and install the Community Edition of Alfresco and then use Alfresco Explorer to create and organize, secure and search, and ultimately administer content placed in the repository. Chapter Four is especially rewarding, providing not only a conceptual introduction to Rules, but also a rich catalog of the actions and conditions that go into the making of them. Chapter Five is also valuable for its explanations on how to use the Content Packager to import and export content to and from the repository, and how on to use the Node Browser to retrieve information about content.Chapters Six through Eleven get into Alfresco development. It starts off with a discussion on how to customize the appearance and display of Alfresco Explorer (Chapter Six) and then delves into the creation of content models, a topic at the heart of Content Management (Chapter Seven.) The Alfresco Javascript, Freemarker, and WebScript APIs are covered in Chapters Eight through Ten, respectively, and Chapter Eleven introduces workflow automation using JBoss jBPM, a workflow engine that comes embedded with Alfresco. In all these chapters, the author makes sure to explain how to deploy solutions to the Alfresco server, and how to integrate these solutions with the Alfresco Explorer interface.Chapters Twelve and Thirteen cover a number of different ways in which Alfresco integrates with end-user applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office as well as email and file servers. Chapter Fourteen completes the book with a description on how to checkout and build the Alfresco Community Edition from Alfresco's public SVN repository.Like other Alfresco books that have come out in the last three years, some of its information is dated due to ongoing development of the product. As of Alfresco Community 3.4e, PostgreSQL replaces MySQL as the default database, and iBatis replaces Hibernate as the default ORM. And in the upcoming Alfresco Community 4.0 release, Activiti is being touted as the embedded workflow engine of choice ahead of JBoss jBPM. Although substantial, most developers will take these changes in stride.I have a single request that I would like address to the Quality Assurance team at Packt Publishing - please take the time needed to address the grammatical shortcomings of your books. Oftentimes when I buy a book from Packt Publishing, I find more than just a few grammatical errors in the book. Don't get me wrong - the books that Packt publishes are helpful to developers and deserve to be published. But Packt has the responsibility of working with their authors to address these issues before they go to press. No one likes to buy a book with grammatical errors in it.So this, in a nutshell, is Alfresco 3 Cookbook. It makes a good developer companion alongside other books like Alfresco Developer Guide (Packt, 2008), Alfresco 3 Business Solutions (Packt, 2011), and Professional Alfresco: Practical Solutions for Enterprise Content Management (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Wrox, 2010.)But there is more to Alfresco than what has been covered in this book. So I heartily recommend that the author consider publishing an advanced Alfresco cookbook on topics such as the use of Alfresco Policies to implement business rules, the use of Alfresco's Auditing framework to implement history beyond that of document versioning and workflow, release management strategies using Alfresco Modules, and, of course, the upcoming Activiti and Solr integrations. Such a book would be a very welcome contribution. Alfresco 3 Cookbook (Packt, 2011) is a good book and I recommend it to anyone learning to work with Alfresco.