The Yii Book, an Update

August 13, 2012

I’m just now putting the wraps on the third edition of my “PHP Advanced: Visual QuickPro Guide” book, this one titled “PHP Advanced and Object-Oriented Programming: Visual QuickPro Guide“. That book will come out in late September, and I’m quite pleased with how it turned out (and hope you will be, too).

With that book almost done, this marks the first time in a long, long, long time (i.e., years) in which I am not facing a deadline. While I’m always doing some things here and there for clients, the books are the projects that have deadlines and around which other work has to be scheduled. With no book contracts currently signed, and therefore with no deadlines, I can now—finally—turn my attention to my book on the Yii framework. Here’s what you can expect…

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Back in May, an interesting article was posted at Zoompf.com titled “html5shiv and Serving Content from Code Repositories“. In it, the author Billy Hoffman argues about why you shouldn’t use the version of html5shiv hosted in Google’s code repository. This is something I did regularly in my “Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design” book, based upon code in the HTML5 boilerplate (I believe). Also, I hand’t really thought about it before. Anyway, the article is something worth reading to get you thinking about the things developers commonly do, and to perhaps change some of those habits.

The inaugural True North PHP conference has been announced to take place in Toronto, Canada, on November 2 and 3, 2012. I have proposed doing a presentation on the Yii framework, introducing the framework and explaining what’s new in Yii2. To buy tickets to the conference, see the True North PHP Web site. To propose your own talk for True North PHP, head to their UserVoice page.

At the UserVoice site, you can also vote for what presentations you think are worth having. Even if you have no plans on attending, but would like me to give a Yii presentation, you can vote for my submission.

In this edition…

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Some time ago, I came across Addy Osmani’s article on JavaScript Style Guides and Beautifiers. Mr. Osmani, in case you’re not familiar with him, is a JavaScript expert and a wonderful writer.

In the article Osmani starts by explaining what style guides are, why they’re important, and what the most common options are. Then the article explains how one might applies style rules to some sample code. The article concludes with a discussion of beautifiers.

All in all, well worth reading if you do any JavaScript programming.