Skip reading me, and read Brad Frost’s review of the book to your left.

Magento is a beast. While it continues to pickup accolades for it’s robust e commerce feature set, developers round the world can’t help but find it difficult to work with.

As someone who’s been working with the system for some 6 or so months now, I’m nowhere near an expert. But one thing I know, is that unlike other CMS’, you can’t just jump right into it… not easily at least.

With wordpress, I started learning how to make custom themes + plugins before I really embraced blogging with it myelf; and for the most part this was fine. By the time I started blogging myself, I already knew the ins + outs of the whole system via development.

This just isn’t true with Magento. Even after I had figured out the difficult things like how to customize a theme, or how to make a extensible module, I was still learning about how the system did what it’s supposed to: manage products.

Packt publishing recently put out a new book on Magento, giving it the title of “Beginner’s guide.” If you’re just getting into Magento, or considering making the jump, this might be agreat read for you.

But don’t take my words for it. Read Part 1 of Brad Frost’s review here.