PrestaShop Module Development by Fabien Serny – a book review

This book, written by one of the original members of the Prestashop developer team, is an invaluable resource for anyone whose income depends at least in part on developing Prestashop modules. The time savings alone, as compared to having to browse through the Prestashop classes and native modules just to find how an example of functionality similar to what you require, are definitely worth the price of admission.

The book outlines Prestashop best practices, goes into detail on the different types of modules, and describes the usage of helper form and list classes, the context object, overrides, and how to handle module updates. Part of this information can be also found in Prestashop’s developer guide, however the book goes into much more detail and lays out quite explanatory code samples. However, the most useful part of it all might be the Native Hooks Appendix, which has a list of all the 145 native hooks (as of Prestashop 1.6) with their descriptions, parameters, and the files they are called from.

As for stuff missing from the book, I believe a section on Functional Testing of modules would have been really useful, since the Prestashop developer community would surely benefit from incorporating automated testing into its development standards. Apart from this, the book’s a real time saver if you’re a Prestashop beginner, and even if you’ve got quite a few modules under your belt, it should at least help to improve the quality of your code.

2 thoughts on “PrestaShop Module Development by Fabien Serny – a book review

  1. Hi Kazeno,
    I will develop application with Prestashop framework. I focus add more new bussiness logic through add new module. But on Prestashop documents on its website is not full detail.
    I want to research more about Prestashop framework.
    I hope you send me this book.
    Thank for your feedback!
    Vu,

    • Hi, unfortunately the copyright doesn’t belong to me, so I’m not allowed to distribute copies to other people. However, Packt Publishing has $5 ebook sales every few months, and the book is easily worth that (even if several things changed in Prestashop 1.7, most of the stuff in the book is still applicable). What you can also do is check the Packt Publishing Free Learning page daily. They give away a different ebook for free everyday, and it’s quite probable they will be giving away this one too in the not too distant future (as well as some other excellent titles from their catalog!).

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