An excellent introduction to Moodle -- a course management system I'm teaching myself. Yes, much of the information is available online at the Moodle site, but I'm a person who would rather look through a book as opposed to clicking links online and printing what I require.

I found this book very confusing in almost every respect. It proved to be of very little help in enabling me to design e-learning programmes. Even my 'techies' found the book to be of little help and resorted to using the Moodle on-line materials

I was very disappointed with this book and will be returning it.

If you have spent a few minutes playing with Moodle and read even a little of the online manual, this book adds nothing new. The system is easy to figure out, as most items are pretty self-explanatory and each option has a handy pop-up help screen that explains anything that you don't understand. The online documentation is very good.

I was hoping this book would explain how to do more advanced things in Moodle - how the many available add-on modules work and what they contribute to a finished system, tips and tricks to add videos and flash files to your courses, best practices for course development, advanced customizing, etc. But there was none of that in the book - only the same information that is already included free with Moodle. Save your money!

Executive Summary: Good, well written overview, buy if you can afford it, a good book by the standards of how to publishing but not critical as a lot of stuff is on Moodle's site.
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Moodle has about 50% of the education market now and there are a lot of people working on it and a ton of information available through moodle's site. Mooodle 1.6, which I am using, has yet to stablizie properly and there are all kinds of bugs needing to be tackled. These vary depending on what level of Apache you use and what your level of admin access is. So, though it is more focused than a lot of other books, your milage will obviously vary depending on your logistics.

Moodle itself is easy enough to use and it helps to be familiar with it before reading through the book. Like most of the other books in this range, I just skim it as I more or less know how to use the admin panel; the book concentrates on front end classroom stuff, not on setting up Moodle and as all classes vary and teachers uses different methodologies or none, it is hard to write a definitive book on a pliable tool. The book is written in very clear and cogent Engish and this is not always the case with how to geek books, so that is a big plus.

Also, there are a few interesting teaching insights in the book, more than most others I have read and they are valuable. It gives for example, novel ways to use Wikis. But you would probably hit on these yourself after a while.

There are different ways of using the functions (different levels of access for teacher only, groups of students and teacher, or everyine doing the class). There are also different ways of teaching; I prefer a more informal approach and beleive in giving the students a lot of rope. This means I will use some functions and ignore others.

I have skipped the set quizes/ exams section for examole as it seems like a lot of useless work unless you have hundreds in your class. But again YMMV. I give it 5 stars as it is a well written book that is more focused than some others I have reviewed here.

The book is OK as a read, but isn't very strong when it comes to actually using Moodle. I was expecting much deeper information than is found in this book. I'm still going to have to spend hours just trying things out on Moodle before I can do anything of real use. It appears that Moodle can be a very powerful tool, but the book seems to focus primarily on entry level knowledge. Too bad.