I’ve been reading more and more articles about HTML5 over the past few weeks and thought I’d just share the most recent few that I’ve found to be interesting.

• Dive Into HTML5 is the most interesting, although it’s also the longest of these resources. This is the online version of the book Dive Into HTML5, by Mark Pilgrim, published by O’Reilly. It’s really well written and approachable. With the online version, you can test most of the new features immediately in your browser.
• HTML5Rocks/ is simple and interactive and shows lots of specific features.
• WTF is HTML5 is just an image presenting the range of what’s falling under the “HTML5” umbrella, as well as current browser support.
• Jeremy Keith has written a new book, HTML5 for Web Designers, although I haven’t read it yet myself.
• An article at InfoWorld presents How to Use HTML5 on Your Website Today, which is probably what you really want to know.

The following links don’t really teach HTML5 so much as talk about some of its issues. Useful if you’re looking for general context or pros and cons.

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• On the Web => Introducing LarryUllman.com!
• On the Blog => Extras for “Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL”
• Q & A => Why use the Yii framework?
• Q & A => When will you be doing an OOP book?
• Q & A => What are some sites that have been created based upon your work?
• What is Larry Thinking? => OOP vs. Procedural, the Battle Continues
• Book Giveaway => “Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL”
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL” and more

About This Newsletter

As a warning, this is the first newsletter being sent out using my new system. I apologize if something totally goes haywire. If so, please let me know and I’ll correct it ASAP.

When I revamped my Web site (changing the domain name from www.DMCInsights.com to www.LarryUllman.com and going from a mostly hand-coded site to one based upon WordPress), I looked into the best ways to integrate a newsletter into a WordPress theme. The highest regarded option seemed to be the Newsletter Pro commercial plug-in. It’s designed for WordPress and has some great features. Unfortunately, the one feature it does not have is support for a plain text version. I mentioned this in my previous newsletter and received no complaints (in fact, I received one response along the lines of “It’s 2010, who cares about plain text newsletters?”). Hopefully everyone’s okay with receiving an HTML version, although I’m going to keep the HTML relatively simple. Of course, I haven’t yet figured out how to customize the newsletter’s template using this new system, so what you’re seeing is neither plain text nor pretty HTML, but rather plain HTML. It’s a start, though.

In continuing my posts of extra bits from my Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL book, here are two pages intended for the end of Chapter 11, “Site Administration ”. This chapter is from Part 3 of the book, which covers the example that sells physical products. The particular extras in the PDF are a handful of tips on how you would expand the site administration.

EffortlessECommerce_BONUS_Ch11.pdf

In continuing my posts of extra bits from my Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL book, here are nine pages intended for the end of Chapter 10, “Checking Out ”. This chapter is from Part 3 of the book, which covers the example that sells physical products. The particular extras in the PDF are:

• Emailing HTML and plain text receipts using the Zend Framework
• Ways to create great customer service
• Security improvements to consider
• Using JavaScript to prevent duplicate orders (i.e., changing and disabling the submit button once it’s been clicked)
• Better use of the gateway communications scripts

Some of the extra code and extra SQL discussed in this PDF is already available for download from the book’s pages on this site.

EffortlessECommerce_BONUS_Ch10.pdf

In continuing my posts of extra bits from my Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL book, here are five pages intended for the end of Chapter 9, “Building a Shopping Cart”. This chapter is from Part 3 of the book, which covers the example that sells physical products. The particular extras in the PDF are five ways you could expand upon how the shopping cart functionality. This includes how you would make recommendations, alternative ways to handle shipping, and how a more efficient database could be had by using VIEW tables.

EffortlessECommerce_BONUS_Ch09.pdf

In continuing my posts of extra bits from my Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL book, here are five pages intended for the end of Chapter 8, “Creating a Catalog”. This chapter is from Part 3 of the book, which covers the example that sells physical products. The particular extras in the PDF are five ways you could expand upon how the product catalog functions.

EffortlessECommerce_BONUS_Ch08.pdf