On August 9 we celebrate Book Lovers Day. It's an unofficial holiday that encourages people to pick up a book and spend the day reading.

Reading can not only be entertaining, but also helps to reduce stress, keeps the brain sharp, and even can help you sleep better (boring reading materials, for sure). Moreover, as scientists say, those who read are much more likely to be empathic and understand others better.

With a view to truly enjoy Book Lovers Day, you must only find a story and read it. The genre of your reading is not the big piece of this, just the process of reading itself matters.

If that's the case, why not choose any Magento Book, especially whether you’re new to Magento or want to push your current skills further?

On the eve of Book Lovers Day, we would like to share a series of the top best Magento must-reads for web developers, helping you stay ahead of the curve, in one of the fastest-moving industries in the world.

You’ll learn how to get started and what you need to practice to be well-versed in Magento from building themes to plugins and mastering the administration panel.

Magento 2 Beginners Guide

Author: Gabriel Guarino
Published: March 2017

Are you new to  Magento? Then this book is for you, as it provides you with the basic knowledge how to build from scratch and manage your very first online store, using the power of Magento 2.

First of all, you'll discover the major e-commerce concepts and features. Then you'll get a general understanding of what Magento is, why and how you should use it. 

This book covers such issues as the migration of development environment to a live store; migration from an old web store to Magento 2; catalog and content management works; shipping rates matrix creation and connection to shippers; sales and customers activity tracking. You'll learn how to create and manage customer contacts and accounts; how to set up a newsletter and transactional emails for your website and a lot more to get started with.

Total words: 39k
Hours to read: 2-3 

Magento 2 Theme Design - Second Edition

This book is useful for existing Magento 1 theme designers and for those web designers and developers with CSS, HTML and XML knowledge, wishing to create themes for Magento 2.

It's a how-guide to creating new responsive themes from scratch and customizing existing ones.

This book presents Magento 2 and its features, the concepts of the Magento theme structure (templates, inheritance, customization). It introduces the Magento UI Library - a new feature available in Magento 2.


Total words: 38k
Hours to read: 2-3


Mastering Magento 2 Second Edition

Author: Bret Williams, Jonathan Bownds 
Published: June 2016

The book provides you with an advanced guide on the Magento 2 platform and teaches how to use all new features and interface thereof to build modern online stores.

This book is a so-called roadmap to managing your Magento store. It covers all areas from creating and managing multiple stores to Magento speed and performance optimization. 

The book covers such areas as themes customization, modules creation and provides a go-live checklist for your Magento 2 launch.

You'll learn how to manage categories, products; design themes, extensions and how to make your store run faster, better, and more productively.

Total words: 74k
Hours to read: 5-6

Learning Magento 2 Administration

Author: Bret Williams, Cyndi Williams
Published: May 2016

If you’ve never touched Magento before and want to pick up the right book to get started - you should choose Learning Magento 2 Administration. It isn’t definitely a development book, but it covers all the basics that a developer should learn before diving into the code. This book covers the newest features in Magento 2.

The book is aimed at store owners who use Magento 2 constantly to operate their online stores as well as developers and solution providers that will be administering a Magento 2 websites.

This guide covers all aspects of managing a Magento 2 store, but the focus thereof is on operational aspects: setting up new features in Magento 2, setting up shipping methods, working with payment methods and adding customer groups.

Total words: 67k
Hours to read: 5-6 

Magento 2 Cookbook

Author: Ray Bogman, Vladimir Kerkhoff
Published: March 2016

This book is written in a cookbook style with over 50 advanced practical recipes listed. You can pick and choose any of them to carry out your day-to-day Magento store tasks.

The book is for existing users, with working knowledge of Magento and basic familiarity with programming. It helps to gain further specialized knowledge and insights into designing, managing and extending Magento online store to meet all the needs. This guide is for those, who want to get their hands dirty writing Magento 2 code.

This merchant and developer guide tells not only how to manage your online store, but how to extend and design it as well, showing some applied examples of creating themes and extensions. 

By the end of this book, you'll be qualified with all development phases of Magento 2  and its essential features.

Total words: 56k
Hours to read: 5-6 

Magento 2 Developer's Guide

Author: Banrko Ajzele
Published: December 2015

The book is a broad-based guide to set up and customize a proficient e-commerce website using the latest version of Magento.

This book, aimed at primarily intermediate-to-professional PHP developer, interested in Magento development, provides a great overview into Magento 2. 

It's a mix of both theoretical and step-by-step approaches on how to extend the core functionality of a Magento 2 store. Topics are explained in a progressive way, giving detailed explanations of the basic and advanced features of Magento 2. Thus, presented in a conversational and easy-to-follow style, this book will ease the learning process on how to extend the core functionality of your Magento 2 store.

By the end of this book, you will have learned a considerable number of techniques to boost and customize your Magento 2 store to follow your business requirements.


Total words: 69k
Hours to reads: 5-6

Mastering Magento PHP Development

You should consider this book, even though it's expected to be published in December 2017 - January 2018 and now available only through the pre-order program.

Author: Ryan Street
Published: January 2018 

The book includes the principles necessary to develop powerful Magento 2 extensions to stay ahead of the game.

By assuming some previous Magento 1 knowledge, the book makes the differentiation between the Magento 1 and new Magento 2. This example-based guide teaches you the initial concepts of the Magento 2 platform and immediately shows you how to implement them.

The book covers the basics of creating and installing new modules. You'll learn about the main ways to customize Magento 2: customizations of catalog infrastructure, pricing, shopping cart, checkout, admin, and API interfaces. You'll get the info how to use data models and how to create your own. The book also demonstrates the unit testing and shows how to develop own tests for extensions.

By the end of this book, you should be able to create advanced customizations for Magento 2 at one stroke. This is the perfect Magento dev book for intermediate-to-advanced developers who want to go far beyond the basics.

There is no absolute best book for learning Magento 2. 
Indeed, with a number of great guides to pick across all skill levels, you have unlimited Magento resources at your fingertips.

Have a nice Book Lovers Day!