Who ever looks for a great CMS should not miss checking out ExpressionEngine! Some people may not pick up the way EE works straight away – but i promise, it is quite easy. You may have faith in my words but sure a book on EE would be better. Here it comes: Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6 – A clear, conscise, and practical guide to creating a professional ExpressionEngine website was written by IT-expert Leonoard Murphy and published by PacktPub.

The subtitle A clear, conscise, and practical guide to creating a professional ExpressionEngine website describes pretty well the content of the first book on EE at all. It teachs beginners setting up an EE driven website step by step.

On 370 pages Leonard guides you through installation and your first posting. Futher chapters enclose:

• Creating an easy to Maintain Website
• Create an Advanced Weblog
• Managing Members
• Creating a Calendar
• Creating a Photogallery

On top of that he introduces you to Add-Ons, the Discussion Forum, the Wiki and the Simple Commerce Modul. For the absolut beginner Leonard did even add a chapter on installing XAMPP and a whole lot of nice exercises.

All in all it is a pretty solid book garned with many screenshots and example code. To me the book is worth 4 stars though not five as i miss a dedicated chapter to EE tags. Those are EE´s spice of life. Ahead of that i miss links/references to further EE sources.

Nevertheless I agree with EE wiz Mark Bowen, saying:
„A very good book which I whole-heartedly believe will help out a lot of people judging from the types of questions seen on the forums every day. Following the book through from start to finish should give a lot more people that light bulb moment.”

It is available as print from PacktPub as well as from Amazon for $35.99. (Also availabe as eBook for $27.19.)

Don´t miss visiting leonardmurphy.com/book. There you´ll find many more information on the book as well as some tutorials.

A beautiful example of what is possible with EE is 50fabulous.com