When I first started blogging almost 3 years ago, I was looking at Roller as my blog engine of choice but the learning curve on the product seemed a bit steep for someone with no experience in this medium. I actually did give Roller a spin for a brief period of time but then became frustrated with the lack of well-written documentation and felt that I wouldn't get off and running easily if I needed to worry not only about the content itself but also managing Roller's internals as well. Too bad for me that this book came out three years later because the Apache Roller 4.0 Beginner's Guide by Alfonso Romero is a near-perfect introduction to blogging and blogging with Apache Roller.



The book's first three chapters cover blogging in general, how to use Roller as your blog engine, and how to get up and running using on Windows or Linux platforms. Detailed instructions are provided for integrating with the techstack that many of us web and middleware administrators are already familiar with: linux, apache, mysql, and tomcat.



Later chapters cover almost everything one would need to know in order to use Roller for creating content, working with images or video, and how to customize styles and templates to get the look you want. I liked how Mr. Romero also included information on dealing with some of the 'gotchas' that one were to come across during normal Roller use. One example is dealing with file upload sizes larger than 1MB and easy-to-follow steps for solving that issue.



Some of the other things that I liked that were included in this guide are tips for blog promotion on various social networking sites but one item missing that I thought might be useful for beginning bloggers as well as bloggers new to Roller was information on search engine optimization. For a blogger like myself who gets 85% of his site's traffic from search engines, I would love to know how to customize individual posts or templates for search engine optimization. Maybe that will be covered in the Intermediate User's Guide (hint, hint!).



To close, the Apache Roller 4.0 Beginner's Guide is a well-written and well-edited book if you want to get up-close and personal with Apache Roller. For bloggers looking to use Roller as their personal or business weblog engine, this book provides pretty much everything one needs to know to get started and I highly recommend getting this book.