After reviewing PHP 5 E-commerce Development Pack Publishing offered me the possibility of reading and reviewing OpenX Ad Server: Beginner’s guide, by Murat Yilmax. This book is targeted to people who want to learn about how to manage a professional advertising solution and not to programmers of any specific language. It’s a very detailed guide of the possibilities of OpenX Ad Server, including detailed tutorials about how to do the most frequent tasks. It also explains a bit about how the advertising process works, from both the point of view of the advertiser and the publisher.

Starting with how to download and install OpenX Ad Server and finishing with how to upgrade it, the book covers everything a publisher would need from a ad serving platform. It can be too detailed at times for somebody who’s already familiar with things such as FTP, but since it’s a beginner’s guide is clear that it doesn’t make any assumption about the technical proficiency of a reader. Every chapter is focused on how to do a single thing (installing, creating accounts, managing accounts, setting up ads and publishing them…) and explains it through both text and tons of screenshots. Screenshots probably compose at least 40% of the book, and make it relatively quick to read and definitely very easy to understand. Nothing is taken for granted, and when something refers to previous chapters the connection is made obvious in case the reader needs to review what he was supposed to do. To top it all, at the end of each chapter there’s a small quiz (answers at the end of the book, no cheating!) to make sure the important concepts have been understood.

Through the book may be too detailed for somebody who is already familiar with web interfaces, it will be great for those who want to be taught what can be done and how to do it. It gives off a mixed feeling of school textbook and really good online tutorial, and the general tone of the book is easy to understand and friendly. It doesn’t go into the details on how things work, but teaches you exactly how to do them. Want to create a campaign and display a banner? Chapter 2 will explain how exactly do that, without delving into such things as databases, cookies, etc… It’s the best user manual OpenX Ad server could ask for and really user friendly.

If you are considering using OpenX Ad server but don’t want to know the technical aspects of it (want to know the how, not the why) then this book is the right one for you. Step by step instructions on how to create and configure campaigns, serve ads, create different types of users, everything you need to offer professional adserving services is there. It even includes examples that most webmasters are familiar with, such as including Google Adsense or Amazon campaigns or including the ad code in Wordpress. But if you find easy to just try an application and understand it, without reading manuals or instructions, this book may just bore you out before you’re done reading it, since it’s extremely detailed and step-by-step. But if you ever though Open X Ad server needed a user manual… well, you just found it.