What this book covers

Chapter 1, Understanding the Platform Architecture, gives a high-level overview of the technology stack, architectural layers, top-level system structure, and individual module structure.

Chapter 2, Managing the Environment, gives an introduction to VirtualBox, Vagrant, and Amazon AWS as platforms to set up development and production environments. It further provides hands-on examples to set up/script Vagrant and Amazon EC2 boxes.

Chapter 3, Programing Concepts and Conventions, introduces readers to a few seemingly unrelated but important parts of Magento, such as composer, service contracts, code generation, the var directory, and finally, coding standards.

Chapter 4, Models and Collections, takes a look into models, resources, collections, schemas, and data scripts. It also shows the practical CRUD actions that are applied to an entity alongside filtering collections.

Chapter 5, Using the Dependency Injection, guides readers through the dependency injection mechanism. It explains the role of an object manager, how to configure class preferences, and how to use virtual types.

Chapter 6, Plugins, gives a detailed insight into the powerful new concept called plugins. It shows how easy it is to extend, or add to, an existing functionality using the before/after/around listeners.

Chapter 7, Backend Development, takes readers through a hands-on approach to what is mostly considered backend-related development bits. These involve cron jobs, notification messages, sessions, cookies, logging, profiler, events, cache, widgets, and so on.

Chapter 8, Frontend Development, uses a higher-level approach to guide the reader through what is mostly considered frontend-related development. It touches on rendering the flow, view elements, blocks, templates, layouts, themes, CSS, and JavaScript in Magento.

Chapter 9, The Web API, takes up a detailed approach to the powerful Web API provided by Magento. It gives hands-on practical examples to create and use both REST and SOAP, either through the PHP cURL library, or from the console.

Chapter 10, The Major Functional Areas, adopts a high-level approach towards introducing readers with some of the most common sections of Magento. These include CMS, catalog and customer management, and products and customer import. It even shows how to create a custom product type and a shipping and payment method.

Chapter 11, Testing, gives an overview of the types of test that are available in Magento. It further shows how to write and execute a custom test.

Chapter 12, Building a Module from Scratch, shows the entire process of developing a module, which uses most of the features introduced in the previous chapters. The final result is a module that has admin and storefront interface, an admin configuration area, e-mail templates, installed schema scripts, tests, and so on.