Larry Ullman

December 14, 2012

"How to Become a Web Developer" Slides

I’ve posted my slides from my " How to Become a Web Developer" presentation at SpeakerDeck. This presentation was created for the Boston PHP user group, and presented on December 12, 2012.

The presentation WAS recorded, and I’ll post a link to that once I know what it is. There’s also a page of related resources that I need to create, which I hope to do over the weekend.

My thanks to everyone for coming out, and to those others of you interested in this.

December 07, 2012

$9.99 eBook Deal on "PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide"

My publisher, Peachpit Press, has a 68% sale price on the eBook of my " PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide" this week. This is my beginner’s guide to programming with PHP, intended for those without any programming experience. This is the fourth edition, which came out last year. The sale price is good until the end of day tomorrow (Saturday, December 8th, PST).

December 05, 2012

Writing the JavaScript Code for Handling Stripe Payments

In my previous post in this series, I covered how you create an HTML form for securely handling payments via Stripe. As explained in that post, thanks to the Stripe.js library, the proper HTML, and a bit of JavaScript, you can easily and securely handle payments on your site without getting mired in the PCI compliance muck. The secret is the Stripe.js library: it sends the customer’s payment information from the client to Stripe’s server and returns a token that Stripe associated with that payment information. Then, when the form is submitted, the token can be used by the PHP on your site to actually process the payment. The customer’s payment information, however, never touches your server. You get paid and the customer is protected.

In this post, I’ll walk through the necessary JavaScript to handle the client-side of that process. Note that this article assumes that you have read the previous article. And comfort with JavaScript and jQuery is required, too.

December 03, 2012

Status on "The Yii Book", Initial Thoughts on Self-Publishing

I haven’t written much about my book on the Yii framework on this blog in a while, so it’s high time for an update. As you may know, as of October 30, 2012, I began selling a self-published book titled, simply enough, " The Yii Book". I’m selling the book in electronic formats—ePub, mobi, and PDF—to begin, and I’m selling it as I write it. I’ve been wanting to write a book about this excellent framework for some time, and thought such a book would be a good candidate for self-publishing, which I feel is an interesting little experiment.

November 30, 2012

Recreating "Knowledge is Power" Using Frameworks

A reader of my " Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL" book took the time to recreate the first example in the book, called “Knowledge is Power”, using frameworks. For the experiment, he replicated the site’s functionality in:

You can see all the results and download the code at https://github.com/hush2.

November 28, 2012

Creating a Form for Handling Payments with Stripe

Once you’ve created a Stripe account and have acquired an SSL certificate, you’re ready to write the form through which you’ll accept payments to be processed via Stripe. This is surprisingly simple to do, and completely secure when done right. In this post, I’ll explain what you need to do with your HTML.