Programming Joomla! Plugins by Jisse Reitsma is a very precisely named book.

Jisse takes 350 pages to cover every aspect of coding Joomla plugins.

Plugins are often forgotten about by Joomla users, relegated in importance behind templates, components and modules.

Jisse dedicates a whole book to restoring plugins to their proper place - central to Joomla's power and flexibility.

If anyone is up to this task, it's Jisse. He knows plugins. Together with his team at Yireo, Jisse has released over 20 Joomla extensions. The list if his gives you a window into what plugins can do:

• Put Joomla behind an SSL certificate
• Merges all your CSS and Javascript files
• Integrate Joomla with Github and New Relic
• Schedule automatic email sending

Jisse's book focuses on the development of plugins, so you will need some PHP and XML knowledge to follow along. If you have those skills, then this book will help you write your own plugins from scratch.

Almost every page on the book is 20% to 50% full of code examples, so this is really is a developer's book.

Yes, there's a lot of code here, but Jisse has made it all available on Github. You don't have to type out those many code examples.

The book isn't organized by projects or tasks, as most OSTraining classes are. Instead, Jisse's approach is to deal with topics. So, Chapter 2 deals with plugin basics, Chapter 3 with XML, Chapter 4 with plugin parameters, Chapter 5 with content plugins, and so on. You won't finish this book having created a number of sample plugins, but you will get a detailed overview of almost everything that plugins are capable of.

Throughout the book, Jisse helps you learn the basics of plugin classes and methods, and also the XML code and framework calls. He also deals with a wide range of other topics from design patterns, autoloaders and parent classes to API hooks, Phing, unit testing and backwards compatibility.

If you want to improve your Joomla development skills, you really should check out this book.

Jisse self-published the book and it's clearly a labor of love, excellently presented and with great attention to detail.

You can get a copy of Programming Joomla! Plugins on Amazon.