Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Liferay Within a Day or Two!

In this modern, fast world it is not practical for anyone to read through a book for months to learn something new. The fact that someone is looking to read up on Liferay is not because they are bored but because there is need to learn Liferay Portal to get on a project or for a potential job opportunity. Liferay Portal 6 Starter is the book you need if you want to get started with Liferay within a day or two.

This is definitely a newbie guide. So you are not expected to know anything about Liferay. This will take you from zero knowledge to an extent that you can start playing and exploring the features of Liferay. Sandeep Nair, the author of this book distills the Top-5 feature of Liferay you must know out of the zillion features the product documentation will teach you. For me this was a book that I finished during my commute time as this is 54 pages cover to cover.

Here are the Top-5 features that you must know about Liferay according to Sandeep in this newbie guide to Liferay:

  1. Content management and workflow
  2. Document management
  3. Collaboration
  4. OpenSocial gadgets
  5. Dynamic Data Lists
Beyond the explanation to these features instructions are also provided to download the product and play with these features. This will help you to get started with Liferay practically than just reading about it. The author will induce your taste buds so that you will start playing around with Liferay when you get started with the instructions in this book to download and work with the features.

Another interesting information I found in this book was the links to some of the useful blogs. With Google all the information on the internet is in your finger tips. But the challenge is to filter the results and end up in useful website. The author provide links to interesting blogs and podcast about Liferay so that the readers are really motivated to learn beyond what is in the book.

Personally I ended up reading a huge beginners guide and then a book for developers when I wanted to learn about Liferay. Had I picked up this book couple of year ago then it would have been a more natural learning curve for me. Still I enjoyed this book and learned new things. If you are newbie to Liferay this is definitely a book that you must start your Liferay journey with.