In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• On the Web => Build Seven Good Object-Oriented Habits in PHP
• On the Web => Improving Site Performance: “Smushing” Images
• On the Blog => Great Web Developer Resources
• On the Blog => More on Non-Relational Databases
• Q&A => Uploading Images to Multiple Directories
• Q&A => How Do You Price a Freelance Project?
• What is Larry Thinking => The JavaScript Problem
• Book Giveaway => “PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide” and “Effortless Flex 4 Development”
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites” (4th Edition) and “Modern JavaScript”

Yogesh, I believe, sent me a link to this interesting article about LinkedIn’s new mobile app. I haven’t personally used the app (although I am on LinkedIn), but the article paints an intriguing picture. Although the app was not written in HTML5, it does make use of HTML5 for better performance. They’ve also minimized the amount of data that must be transmitted back and forth between the app and the server, which is better not just for the end users (especially the international ones) but also for the server. Speaking of which, the LinkedIn mobile team swapped out the Ruby on Rails-based server-side for one using the increasingly-popular Node.js (server-side JavaScript). If I read the article correctly, these changes allowed them to cut down from 15 servers with 15 virtual machines on each, to just four virtual machines.

My thanks to Yogesh for passing this along to me!

I am very happy to say that the fourth edition of my “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide” book is officially off to the printer today! That means it should be available for purchase soon.

Update: I believe the “release date” is September 9th.

The widget below shows Amazon’s current price for the book. Thanks to everyone in advance for their interest in this book (or any of them)!

I use Campaign Monitor to send out my monthly (or sometimes slightly faster than that) newsletter. Campaign Monitor is an excellent service, and I’ve been really pleased with what they offer, especially for the price. They recently turned me onto Fractal, an HTML/CSS email validation tool. It’s simple to use…Just take the HTML and CSS portion of the email you’re about to send, post it in the textarea on the Fractal home page, and submit the form. The result will be a list of all HTML tags and CSS properties that have no or partial support in desktop, Web-based, or mobile email clients (Lotus Notes 6 & 7 came up a lot for me; I didn’t really people still used Lotus Notes!). Then you can use that information to tweak the HTML email, to insure better reliability for viewers.

I’m doing a final round of research before I begin writing my forthcoming JavaScript book and I came across some pretty good resources that I thought I’d share. (Actually, this is more of a half-truth, because I’ve already started writing the book and I’ll no doubt continue doing research while writing the book, but this is my last “have I forgotten anything that I should cover?” review.)

I’ve been targeting JavaScript information, so it’s no surprise that Mozilla, keepers of the JavaScript flame, would have wonderful information about the language on their site. This includes the JavaScript reference materials (i.e., all the objects, methods, etc.), a JavaScript primer, and some good articles. But Mozilla’s developers pages also do a great job of discussing HTML and CSS. The Mozilla " Learn How To Make Websites" section is particularly useful, especially for beginning Web developers.

One of the links at Mozilla’s pages took me to the developer’s section of the Opera Web browser’s site. I would recommend reading Opera’s WebPlatform Docs, a series of 51 articles on Web development, from design, to HTML, to Accessibility, on through CSS, and JavaScript. Another 11 articles have been added covering HTML5.

I don’t normally do this kind of thing, but I saw a deal today at MacUpdate Promo, which is 58% off of MAMP Pro. In US dollars, that brings the price from $59 down to $25. If you were ever considering paying for the pro version of MAMP, today’s the day! Unfortunately the offer ends shortly, but hopefully some people will be able to take advantage of it. (And, no, I’m not affiliated with either MacUpdate or MAMP).