MODx Web Development book from Packt Publishing provides great documentation for MODx CMS users (if you’re not familiar with this flexible and powerful CMS, check out How to make website with MODx CMS in 10 minutes. MODx Web Development book starts from how MODx fits into family of content management systems and goes to step by step explanation on how to setup, customize and manage site on MODx. The book also contains a lot of code examples and illustrative screenshots.

While no knowledge of PHP or programming is needed to start with MODx Web Development book, by the end of reading it you will know everything needed to create a powerful, dynamic website. This book can be extremely useful both for beginner and advanced users since it outlines most required solutions, tips and tricks in one place.

The book was written by Antano Solar who is a tech evangelist of open source community and CTO of NuVeda Learning. Antano Solar won two Yahoo hack awards as well as the award for developing a Hybrid Search Engine from scratch in 24 hours.

MODx Web Development book consist of 13 Chapters and here’s summary of what these chapters cover:

1. What is MODx? This chapter covers general concepts of web development, and also tells why MODx is a good tool to develop your web site.
2. Getting Started In this chapter, you will learn how to set up a working platform for developing web sites with MODx.
3. MODx Basics This chapter explains documents and containers. You will also learn how to create, edit, and manipulate documents, and manage their configurations.
4. Templating In this chapter, you will learn how to create/add templates. It explains template variables, snippets and chunks.
5. Authentication and Authorization This chapter shows how to modify the site to have a signup and login form and how to enable blogs to be posted only by friends. This is a sample chapter of this book available for free download.
6. Content Aggregation This chapter explains how to create aggregation and feeds using Ditto snippet and how to tag documents and use tagging in MODx.
7. Creating Lists This chapter covers creating lists of documents and how to make make list creation fexible using Wayfinder.
8. Snippets This chapter covers use the hundreds of snippets available. It also suggests how to search for snippets not included in MODx default package.
9. PHx In this chapter, you will learn how to format the values in template variables, make conditions and accordingly present a different output either from the HTML in the expression or from a chunk or snippet.
10. Simple Recipes This chapter explains how to use all you already have learnt to integrate a forum, an image gallery, or forms that can send a mail, create web user profiles, and identify similar posts for blogs.
11. Creating Snippets In this chapter, you will learn how to create snippets, the different ways of displaying their output, and how to implement them. You will also learn how and why to use the available MODx APIs.
12. SEO, Deployment, and Security This chapter shows how to make the site optimized for search engines using clean URLs, meta tags, sitemaps, and other tweaks.
13. Plug-ins and Modules In this final chapter author writes about plug-ins and modules, events and plug-in configuration.

Verdict: MODx Web Development book is highly recommended for everyone who would like to learn MODx CMS and use it for web development.