Packt Publishing has announced the first Joomla book. Building Websites with Joomla by Hagen Graf is a step by step tutorial to getting your Joomla! CMS website up fast.

This book is a fast paced tutorial to creating a website using Joomla!. If you’ve never used Joomla!, or even any web content management system before, then this book will walk you through each step in a friendly and accessible way. From installation, to initial set up and content entry and then on to customization for your own look and feel, this book will get you to a stable and working Joomla! based web site fast. You don’t have to be an experienced web developer or designer to get a great looking site with a full set of functions using this book and Joomla!

The book begins by introducing Joomla! and concepts behind content management. Then the installation of Joomla!, and its supporting software [Apache/MySQL/PHP] is covered clearly and simply. Once you have the installation up and running, we then take a tour of Joomla! as it appears out of the box, to familiarize ourselves with how it works and what is what. As you take the tour, your own ideas for what you need in your new website begin to crystallize around what you can see Joomla! is capable of. Then it builds own web application, using only the the features of Joomla! we really need. Once we have a base version of our site up, we then learn how to change its appearance and feature set to suit our particular requirements, including bringing it into line with an established corporate identity. At the end of the book it is shown how you can add your own extensions to Joomla!.