In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• What Were You Thinking? => Building a Career
• On the Blog => MongoDB
• On the Blog => “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide (4th Edition)” Rough Table of Contents
• Q&A => How do you think Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL will impact MySQL?
• Q&A => What are your thoughts on mobile apps?
• What is Larry Thinking => How I Got Here
• Book Giveaway => “PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide (4th Edition)”
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites” and the JavaScript Book

Someone, I forget who (sorry), referred me to MongoDB, some time back. I haven’t written about this yet, as I was having trouble “getting” MongoDB. This isn’t going to be an exhaustive introduction to MongoDB, but I want to explain what I finally “got”. And although that I’m still not sure MongoDB is right for me, today at least, it definitely seems to be something worth keeping an eye on going into the future.

Having written 20 books, numerous articles, 260 blog postings, and 38 newsletters (at the time of this writing), it’s probably safe to say that I qualify as a “writer” by now. Once you’ve gone past your first million words, I think the label applies. Over the past few months I’ve happened to speak with several different people, sharing what I’ve learned about writing, and there’s one insight that seems to be the most intriguing and useful to those that aren’t accustomed to sitting at their computer for hours on end trying to put two good paragraphs together: writing is the least important step in the writing process.

Sayyid Alireza Hoseini of bugX.ir recently conducted an email interview with me, that has now been posted on bugX.ir. In case you don’t read Persian, here’s the English version of the interview:

1- Where are you living?

I have lived in the United States my whole life, and currently live in the state of Pennsylvania.

2- Are you working in any special company?

I’ve been working for myself since 1999, although I’m technically incorporated.

3- If you were a person who was chosen to write a secure web service, what would you use to write your web service – PHP, ASP.NET, Zend, etc?

PHP is my first language of choice. I have worked with ASP.NET (in C#) and think it’s pretty good, but it requires Windows to both develop and to run, which is a problem for me. I like aspects of the Zend Framework, and occasionally use it piecemeal, but don’t use it extensively or exclusively. If I were to write a secure Web service today, I’d do it in straight-up PHP.

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I’m just about finished with Chapter 7 of the fourth edition of my “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide”. I thought I’d take this time to finally share the rough version of the Table of Contents (this is actually version 2, as the first version was changed while working on the SQL and MySQL chapters).

In my newsletter, I had presented some of my thoughts as to changes for the fourth edition, and I received a ton of very useful replies. Before showing the TOC, I want to discuss the feedback and how that impacted my plan.

As I’ve written before, I’m a fan of Adobe AIR, although it hasn’t yet caught on as much as I would have thought. You may also know that Adobe develops a ton of cool things in their Adobe Labs. Many things go from the Labs to a full-scale release, others never do. In any case, it’s often worth while scrolling through the Labs to see what Adobe’s up to lately (the same goes for Google labs).

I recently came across two interesting things at Adobe Labs:

• Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Incubator, a technology preview program for experimenting with “bleeding-edge” capabilities of the Flash platform.
• Adobe AIR Launchpad, a desktop tool that helps to create Flex-based applications to be run through Adobe AIR. Run the tool, select a destination (desktop or mobile device), establish some base settings, select the features the application will want to use, and the Launchpad will generate a ready-to-compile AIR application with those features and settings. Or you can use the generated ZIP to open and edit the project in Flash Builder. It’s just a nice little automated tool to further expedite an already fast process.

I haven’t played with these others yet, but plan on doing so (they look useful):

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