Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Although a comparison cannot be made, because of the lack of competition (discarding the online help at MediaWiki.org) the MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide is a good and must have reference for anyone working with MediaWiki as administrator but also as user, offering almost anything one would want to know to start off with, to maintain and to customise and even hack a wiki installation. For those wanting to go a bit further with writing real PHP code for creating extensions, custom wiki markup and special pages, the book offers some nice code examples to work with and to modify to one's needs.
The book could have benefited from somewhat richer content, such as more references to additional sources on the Internet and especially something like break-out boxes presenting experiences from admins of major wiki real life implementations. Next to that it appears that some more time should have been spend on a better index, correcting language, typos and structuring in general.
My book rating: 8
To summarise: the pros and cons
Pros:
+ Almost everything you will need for a basic MediaWiki installation, its maintenance and some customisation is available in this book. It is a complete reference for admins but certainly also for users, that would like some basic understanding of MediaWiki.
+ Very nice and easy to grasp examples of skin customisation and creation (I am no PHP expert!).
+ Good example on creating an article rating system extension and accompanying special page. With this knowledge and some additional PHP you will be able to try out a couple of your extension idea's quite easily I guess.
+ There is a nice bonus chapter (11) presenting 7 extensions and some support on how to install them.
+ A book is so much easier than an online source! Of course this is not a pro for this book per se, but for others as well.
Cons:
+ Missing 1: some practical case studies of real life MediaWiki implementations and preferably interviews with the admins of the practise of maintaining a wiki
+ Missing 2: More attention to anti-vandalism tools out there, dedicated to preventing rather than cleaning-up.
+ Missing 3: A good index: the index at the end of the book is way too brief to be of real value for someone trying to find something back in the book.
+ Missing 4: Too little in-text references and no references section in the book, for further reading or information, like most important forums for those looking for help (like the MediaWiki Mailing List Archive and MWusers.com).
+ Sometimes the English used suggests a lack of some decent editorial oversight (or shall I call it charming?)
+ Chapter 1, describing wiki's in relation to weblogs, forums and CMS systems and the position in Web 2.0 is not really convincing. Furthermore, although alternative wiki systems are briefly mentioned, no real and "honest" comparison is made.
+ Images and tables are not numbered, which is not good for readability.
+ The typographical distinction between paragraph and sub-paragraph could have been better
Click Here to see more reviews about: MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide: Install, manage, and customize your MediaWiki installation
This book covers the open-source MediaWiki wiki engine from installation and getting started through structuring your collaborative website, advanced formatting, images, multimedia, security, and managing users to backing up, restoring, and migrating your installation and creating new MediWiki templates. The author, Mizanur Rahman, is a Senior Software Engineer at ReliSource Technologies. The book has a fast-paced, friendly tutorial style and uses a fun example to teach all of MediaWiki's key features. This book is for competent computer users who want to run MediaWiki. They should have some knowledge of HTML and have used a wiki before. No PHP knowledge is required for most of the book, although some chapters at the end include some PHP code.
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