MODX: The Official Guide - Comprehensive Tutorial for Web Developers | Learn MODX CMS for Building Dynamic Websites & Online Stores

My biggest complaint with this book is its size: this is an over-sized volume and at almost 800 pages it's pretty heavy; it's nearly impossible to hold comfortably in one hand.The author gushes about Modx in the intro chapter...that's more comforting than starting the book by saying "this product sucks" but it serves to warn that the author is a tad partial.All-in-all, this is a really good book. The author addresses pretty much all of the issues that you need to know to develop a site with Modx and does so at a level that seems appropriate to most or all audiences. I do think you'd benefit by installing Modx and playing with it for a day or so before tackling the book...the book gave me many "aha!" moments when reading because I had already struggled with so many of the concepts. The author introduces liberal doses of "here-is-how-I-would-do-it" in the book and these are very appreciated; they serve to underscore areas and concepts that aren't necessarily intuitive.Modx is a great Web development framework with many CMS-like features but there are powerful constructs and concepts that are really difficult for the newcomer to fully grasp. For example, a "site context" was something that I was sure was important but had no idea why. In a few quick paragraphs, the book showed me the power and the potential of site contexts within the first 30 pages or so. I had spent two hours trying to figure out how to do a certain task un-cached and was utterly defeated. The author solved the problem with a simple operator ([[!...). Duh.Modx comes in two flavors: Evolution and Revolution. It appears to me that Revolution (essentially, Modx 2+) is a rework of the original framework where the developers decided to bite the bullet and throw out the bad ideas. To the Modx newbie, the differences between the two products aren't apparent at first and yet they are critical to know because it is easy to start researching a problem and heading off in a wrong direction because you have inadvertently stumbled across an Evolution discussion.I recommend circling some passages with a pen or pencil and dog-earing the pages to come back to them. As I read sections of the book, my instinct was to go try some of the ideas presented but I think you're better off reading through most of the book skimming over sections that aren't immediately important. Then, go back and review those pages that contained valuable nuggets of code or procedures.I've written a number of programming books and know how big of a job an undertaking of this scope is. Kudos to Bob Ray and his co-authors for a definitive work.