I purchased this book for a client as part of my service offering for a zen-cart install. The client really appreciated the extra touch by providing this book.

As a developer, I can say that this book is very well written and a big help to anyone who is new to zen-cart. Great use of screen shots throughout the book and really helps during "customer training". If you are new to zen-cart, buy this book, it will help you through many "getting started" items, as well as show you many features which you probably didn't even know existed... leading to increased sales at the end of the day ... which means the book pays itself off :)

Hats off to the author for the effort, and a special thank you to the Zen-Cart team who created a product which is by far the best e-commerce solution available on the market... without them, this book wouldn't be possible, my business wouldn't be possible, and more important, REAL e-commerce wouldn't be possible.

Ahmad Rahman
TRUST IT | web site design and development
mobile: 416.828.0224 | email: ahmad@trustit.ca
www.trustit.ca
For IT solutions how you want IT, when you want IT, TRUST IT.

This excellent book will help you decide whether or not you want to use Zen Cart or some other product.



I found the book to be easy to use and helped me decide to go ahead and choose Zen for my store. I had been expecting to pay someone more money than I can afford to set up the store, but it looks like I can easily do it myself.



So, that is what I will try next. I will post another review if it turns out I made a mistake in choosing Zen Cart, but in either case, this book was a great help in laying it all out for me in an easy to use fashion.

I bought this book with some dubiousness as I have been using Zen Cart for a while and wasnt sure that it would be a benefit to own.
I was wrong! I have learnt new tricks and solved problems in minutes rather than hours.

I will strongly recommend it to anyone who is learning or about to learn how to use/implement Zen Cart and in future should I sell a website to someone which uses ZenCart I will be including the manual in the package.

This book is money well spent. I am running on a WHM/cPanel hosting account and the Zen cart download went flawlessly. I even downloaded a great template with the help of this book. I love all of the power and options of Zen Cart but in my opinion the stock front page is ugly and cluttered, but there are a ton of free and purchasable templates out there on the web. This book is very in depth about all of the screens and options and the pictures look exactly as they appeared on my computer. I have been running an eBay store as well as an html based pay pal shopping cart for years and decided to take a step up in professionalism to a PHP based shopping cart. So far I am very impressed with this book and Zen Cart as a whole. At first when I opened up my Zen Cart admin page it seemed very overwhelming, but this book helped me cut right into it and start making progress immediately, cleaning up the front page and omitting all of the standard options that I did not like, as well as the email and log in options. I highly recommend this book.

It's always of great help to have the book on my desktop, to remind me what to do on the project or to tell me where I do something wrong. Really worth the money I spent. really thanks to the author

I bought this book primarily for its info on installing a local web server. I did the installation, exactly following the steps outlined in the book. But the Apache service wouldn't start. The book's advice if one of the components doesn't start is to "press the Start button". I pressed the start button and it still didn't start. So what next? No troubleshooting guide, no weblinks indicating where I can get help, no clue as to what the issue could be.>

So on only page 34, I'm dead in the water. The book is totally worthless. Worse than worthless because after the installation, my internet connection was all screwed up and is only running at 24k (SLOW dial-up speed). It was torture going thru all the links to write this review at that speed but I wanted to save others from wasting their money and screwing up their computers!!!

This book was not what I thought it would be. I bought the book because I wanted to add the customer's fax number to invoices and packing slips. I figured this book would have information on how to modify and create forms. Sadly, the book devoted less than one page about invoices which was just a rehash of the online docs.


I also wanted to know how to go into the system and modify orders. Again, this book provides no insight on how to modify orders. I also was looking for information on how to reset a user's password.


And finally, I wanted to know how to edit the BLOB fields associated with product attributes directly since there is no way to go back and edit orders and the order attributes once they have been entered. Again, the book lacks anything about the database schema. On the front end, it seems like one is setting attributes to TEXT. But in the database table, it is stored as a BLOB.


Overall, I am disappointed with the book. I was looking for more than a How-To guide on how to print an invoice or add an image to a product. And I am still trying to figure out why the orders table doesn't even have the customer's fax number. Now I can't even modify the invoice.php to easily add the field to the query. Grrr.

I've been trying to set up my own store with very little experince. I was very interested to see if this book could finally get me started, as most resources seem to jump to the more technical stuff, before addressing the simple stuff a beginner may need help with...like creating a test web server.

This book got me farther than any other resource. It was WELL worth the investment.

I also wish I had purchased this book sooner. Just briefly flipping through it the day I got it, I was able to resolve several issues that had been giving me trouble with my cart. I made back the money I spent on the book the first day in my time alone!

I wish I had purchased this book sooner then I did. Only having it for weeks now has saving me a lot of headaches. A must have for any Zen cart owner/maintainer....

This book is great. Not only is the book great, the man who wrote the book is great. He is apart of the zen cart community and works hard to update the book if there are any errors and works with people who have bought the book, to make it better. KH, thank you for all your hard work.

Shaun
www.skinevo.com

I've been using this book now for a few weeks and find it a great help in understanding the operation of the Zen Cart store. This book is the user manual I supply to my web development customers now. Great Book!

The focus of this book is the installation and operation of a Zen Cart website. The pages are filled with plain-english explanations of how to configure and manage your Zen Cart and also includes a thorough index to help you quickly find answers. An abundant number of screen-shots are included throughout the book to help you visualize what is being explained.

This book, while touching upon templates, is not a website design book. Zen Cart design and templating is a completely separate topic from installation and operation of Zen Cart and will require a complete book on it's own.

That said, this book is worth it's weight in gold for the serious online store owner using Zen Cart. As a certified Zen Cart webhost (www.sashbox.net), we refer to this book frequently to answer questions our clients have and we always tell them, "Here's the answer we found on page xxx" of the book and encourage them to purchase their own copy.

I was hoping there would be a chapter on skinning or creating custom templates. This is after all what sets your store apart from others, its look and feel. I was disappointed not to see this included. However the rest of the book is an excellent resouce.

Tens of thousands of people have set up webshops using Zen Cart - from rank amateurs to professional web designers. Yet, despite the power of this software, very few Zenners unleash its true potential.The biggest impediment has not been the lack of information - (the support forum, wiki and knowledgebase are full of tips, tricks and solutions to problems) - but the lack of a comprenehsive, structured, yet easy-to-follow guide... taking both the novice and the competent enthusiast through the core Zen Cart processes, step-by-step. I have built a large number of webshops using Zen Cart, and in the 2 years since I began using it, I have spent many hundreds of hours on the forum, in the knowledgebase and on the wiki. It took me less than ten hours to read the book - and in so doing I discovered that after all my time spent in the support forums I was still not using half the resources available in Zen Cart to their full potential. If you're serious about e-commerce with Zen Cart - then stop messing about. Buy this book.

I consider myself to be an experienced computer user, and even a sometimes programmer and developer. I thought the Zen Cart forums and wiki and tutorials would be sufficient. But then I saw this book. It's great! This book is the "missing manual" for Zen Cart. It carefully and thoroughly leads you through what you need to know to get started with Zen Cart. Most of all it keeps you from having to search the forums, not knowing, usually, what you're looking for. It has a well done Index and a well organized set of chapters, so no matter which way you approach a problem, you can find what you need. There's only about 40 pages (out of nearly 400 in total) about customizing your store. But to be fair, that could easily be a whole book all to itself. This is the manual for Zen Cart, and it gets you started with your customization. And it's a good start. This is the first time I've ever purchased a print-after-order book, and I didn't know what to expect as far as quality. I'm very pleased with the paper and binding quality, and with the layout and readability of the book. I expect it'll be well thumbed and marked up in the near future. I think I need to go buy a box of sticky notes.

What I really like about this book is that it has something for everyone. Zen Cart is a powerful, feature-rich e-commerce platform that can appear overwhelming to new users - Goh Koon Hoek leads his readers through the complexity in simple, clear and easily understood language. But it's not just new users who will benefit from it. The book's comprehensive presentation of Zen Cart's features also makes it a valuable reference book for professional designers who need a refresher on a particular topic because they haven't used it recently, or need to improve their acquaintance with recent enhancements. This book is never far from my desk. And whether you are a store owner developing a Zen Cart for yourself, or a professional designer developing e-commerce sites for your clients, or somewhere in between, I recommend that you too buy this book and keep a copy close at hand. Peter Coles - www.kuroiwebdesign.com

I've had this manual for a few weeks now and it has it's own place on my desk sitting in a cook book holder so I can follow the step by step instructions. It explains the how's and whys to the most common questions, and the even questions that you didn't know you needed to ask. Install apache, php, mysql on your pc as your test server so that you don't crash your store by testing your changes on a live store. It explains the value and how to use the template override system so that you no longer have to be afraid of loosing your changes after upgrading to the latest version. It's organized in a logical step by step process of installing your store, configuring the store, how your products will display, setting up the taxes, the languages, and much more. Weather your a store owner, or web designer, this will help you get an ecommerce site up quickly and easily. The hardest part becomes putting the products in the cart. Buy the book!!! John Patrick, www.birdoasis.com

Just got my copy today. Good layout and very good binding. More than I expected. Has already been of help. Easier to find the answers I needed. Good companion to the website. Doc

There is a frequently asked question on the Zen Cart forum - “Where can I find the manual?” Well, we now have the answer - it’s here!Checked for accuracy by the Development Team prior to publication, e-Start Your Web Store with Zen Cart contains the answer to just about every basic “How do I … ?” question that has appeared on the forums (and some that haven’t!) and is going to be an indispensable administrative tool for every Zen Cart store owner and anyone engaged in building Zen Cart stores for other people.Goh Koon Hoek starts by giving a detailed guide on how to set up your own PC as a local server to allow you to install, test and build your Zen Cart store prior to putting it live, before going on to explain every admin setting in an easily understood way - for the first time in over 2 years of building Zen Cart stores, I finally understand Price Factor and Offset!There are plenty of screenshots and examples throughout the book, aiding the excellent descriptions of the admin functions and settings, as well as guidance on template creation. The latter is aimed at beginners and is appropriately at a basic level but there is certainly enough information to help you make your store look different from other Zen Carts.The Table of Contents is logically laid out, with chapter headings and sub-headings aligned very closely with the admin menu headings and sub-headings.Everybody with a Zen Cart store needs this book – my copy will be by my keyboard for quick reference when asked those questions that I really ought to know the answers to! Rick Suffolk (Ryk)