Larry Ullman

Translating Geek Into English

Caching the Database Schema using MemCached with Yii

I’ve just wrapped another project using the Yii framework (my fourth in the past year) and so I’ve got a few more topics to write about. I really like the Yii framework (obviously) and think it’s very accessible, but there are still things that take me some time to figure out, so those topics make for good blog posts! In this one, I’ll walk through what I had to do to cache the database schema using memcached. For that matter, I’ll explain why you’d want to do this in the first place…

What is Larry Thinking? #29 => E-Commerce, Flex, and Self-Publishing

In this edition…

About This Newsletter

This newsletter turned out to be a peek into the future and, well, rather self-serving. I compile these newsletters largely based upon what I’ve been working on lately or thinking about, and this time around this largely means what I have been publishing, or am about to. So while I try not to make this newsletter too much about me, I’m consoling myself with the thought that you’ve subscribed to this newsletter because you’re interested in what I’m doing. The newsletter has three big topics, related to books past, present, and future: Flex, E-commerce, and JavaScript. I’ve also thrown in a couple of other references, for variety. If you make it all the way to the bottom of this read (it’s long, even for me), you’ll find out about my “Effortless Flex 4 Development” giveaway! As always, thanks for your interest and please share any questions, comments, and winning lottery numbers you may have…

…

Five Flex/Flash Builder Tips in Five Days

Peachpit Press, on their Web site, is in the process of publishing two series of “Five Tips in Five Days” blog posts that I have written. One is on the Flex 4 framework and the other is on the Flash Builder IDE. As of this writing, nine of the ten posts have gone live with the other one  expected tomorrow. All of the posts are written for those with an understanding of Flex 4 and Flash Builder, respectively, highlighting new or less-known features and concepts. But even if you aren’t familiar with either, you may want to take a gander at them to get a sense of what Flex 4 and Flash Builder are capable of doing. The best way to access them is through my reference page at Peachpit’s site.

“Effortless Flex 4 Development” Released!

I am very pleased to announce that my latest book, “Effortless Flex 4 Development”, came out today. Well, kind of. I received my copies today, which means that the book does exist in physical format, although it may be a couple/few days before it’s on bookshelves. Amazon has it listed as being available on July 5, 2010 and currently sells it for $29.69 (the MSRP is $44.99). I will also be giving away a few copies to people subscribed to my newsletter.

As always, my thanks to those interested in my work!

My Forthcoming E-Commerce Book, Rough Table of Contents

I am very pleased to say that I’ve just finished the rough draft of the Table of Contents for my forthcoming “E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL” book, to be published by New Riders Fall 2010. I’ve been wanting to do this book for some time (and was supposed to do it last year) and readers have been asking for it for even longer, so I’m really excited to get going on it finally.

Safari 5

Last week, version 5 of the Safari Web browser was released, for both Windows and Mac OS X. Although Safari doesn’t have a large user base, Apple is becoming more and more significant with Web standards, so I thought I’d look at what the new version of Safari has to offer (Safari is my #2 browser, after Firefox, with about a 65/35 split as to how much I use each).