For many of my books, bonus content is made available through the publisher. Sometimes this is material that was intended for the book but had to be cut, such as an appendix or a chapter, and sometimes the material is a true bonus, such as a video screencast. Because it’s not clear for everyone how to access this bonus material, I thought I’d quickly post instructions here.

1. Head to Peachpit.com (almost all of my books are published by Peachpit Press)
2. Click on Account Sign In at the top of the page.
3. If you don’t already have an account with Peachpit.com, click the Create a new one… link to register.
4. After you have registered, login.
5. On your account page (after logging in), click Registered Products.
6. On the Registered Products tab, click Register Another Product.
7. Follow the instructions to register the book.
8. Return to the Registered Products page.
9. For the book in question, click the Access Bonus Content link. That will take you to a page with all the bonus content for a given book.

Besides being able to access bonus content, there are other benefits to registering at Peachpit’s site. And while you’re there, you can also check out my author page, which lists the books I’ve written for Peachpit, the articles I’ve published there, and the blog postings I’ve published there. Both the articles and blog postings are viewable without registration or logging in.

It was recently pointed out to me by a couple of readers that they found my explanation for how to read the PHP manual, presented in Chapter 1 of my “PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide”, to be confusing. I think that learning how to read the manual is quite important, but I can see now that my presentation of that subject was a bit much at that early stage of the game, at least for absolute beginners. In any case, in that discussion, someone shared a link to a page in the PHP manual titled " How to Read a Function Definition", which they found to be useful. So I thought I’d share it here!

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• What Were You Thinking? => Looking Both Ways
• On the Web => Columbia’s Break Writing Series
• On the Web => The Heisenbug and Others
• On the Web => Take Control of Scrivener 2
• On the Blog => Another “Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design” Update
• Q&A => Should One Enforce Business Ethics?
• What is Larry Thinking => The Dangers of Shared Hosting
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design”

I last posted an update on my forthcoming JavaScript book, Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design, just over two months ago, so it’s high time I posted another update. Of course, I’ve been working so hard on the book that I haven’t done a very good job of putting out regular, good blog posts in the interim. Still, here’s where things stand…

The good news is that I just submitted the first draft of Chapter 10, “Working with Forms.” Although forms have been used to some degree since Chapter 2, “JavaScript in Action,” this chapter rounds out the knowledge of forms with respect to JavaScript. The chapter worked out much like a “recipe” type of chapter, with discussions of common tasks plus specific code for performing that task. Some of the examples are:

• Inline error messages
• Tooltips
• Creating a master checkbox (that toggles a group of other checkboxes)
• Linked select menus
• Enabling/disabling submit buttons

The chapter also covers regular expressions, with a focus on validation. Because  regular expressions are complicated, and there’s already a lot of material in the book, I tried to keep the coverage as accessible as possible, without going into too much high-end stuff. The chapter ends with a good and realistic form validation example that combines most of the above.

I’ve recently come across a couple of free, public programming courses, as a series of videos, that may be of interest to those of you out there (I haven’t had the time to view many of the individual episodes, but they look promising).

The first is an Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, from an instructor at MIT. It’s definitely for beginners and although it uses Python as its primary language, the goal is to convey the fundamentals and the theories involved. It probably gets a bit too high-end for some, but worth taking a gander at regardless.

The second series is programming literacy’s Core units. This series is much more broad and covers a range of languages and topics. As I write this, the first six units have been completed and are available as YouTube videos, with downloadable PDFs (and other formats) for the slides and notes. On the other hand, the last one was finished about 20 months ago, so there may never be more in the series. Still, it’s approachable and I like that the materials are available for viewing separately. And the price is right!

Columbia University has a BreakWriting program that encourages students to write during their December-January semester break. Last year’s series of 16 posts have been put online and are well worth reading if you do any writing (or think about doing any). Each posting has oodles of useful, real-world advice, with plenty of tips and recommendations for being as successful as possible when it comes to writing (success here being measured in terms of actually writing, not commercial success).