Preface

Magento is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms on the market. It contains a lot of e-commerce functionality, it is stable, and it is free. This means that a lot of people choose Magento for their online business.

The first stable version of Magento was released in 2008. The later releases were based on the first version of Magento. Technology changes quickly and Magento needed a big update—a big release Magento 2 is now ready.

Developing in Magento is not as easy as you would expect. Even if you have knowledge of Magento 1, a good guide with practical examples that shows you the best practice is a must have, and this is exactly what this book will do.

With Magento 2 Development Cookbook, we will cover the most important topics that will help you become a good Magento 2 developer. We will start with the basics and we will end with the more advanced topics.

This book is divided into several recipes, which show you which steps to take to complete a specific action. In each recipe, we have a section that explains how everything works.

We will start this book with the creation of a good development environment. For a good development environment, we need the right tools. We will install Magento and we will discuss how we can migrate data from a Magento 1 to a Magento 2 shop. Next, we will see some functional stuff. You will learn how the catalog system works, which product types are available, and a lot more.

After this, you will learn how we can create a Magento theme to change the look and feel of the Magento shop. But the main focus of this book will be the development part. We will create a custom module that we will extend with a lot of common features that are used in Magento projects, such as extra controller pages, database integrations, custom shipping methods, and extra backend interfaces.

At the end of this book, we will see how we can improve the performance of a Magento shop. Finally, we will see some debugging techniques, such as Xdebug and creating unit tests using the Magento test framework.