In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• On the Blog => Comments for My Forthcoming E-Commerce Book
• On the Blog => Speeding Up Your Web Site
• On the Web => MaxMind JavaScript Web Service
• Q&A => About Adobe AIR
• What is Larry Thinking? => Finding a Graphic Designer
• What is Larry Thinking? => Rich Internet Applications
• Book Giveaway
• My Book News => My E-Commerce Book!

About this Newsletter

Three big things in this here newsletter: a request for feedback on my forthcoming e-commerce book, potential work for a professional graphic/Web designer, and a book giveaway. I expect I’ll get plenty of replies to this newsletter! Thanks in advance for reading, for your interest in my books, and for any comments and questions you may have. (As an aside, I’m finishing this as I have a head cold, so my apologies if there’s some really wonky writing in here!)

On the Blog => Comments for My Forthcoming E-Commerce Book

As I mentioned in my previous newsletter, Peachpit Press has agreed to publish my E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL book (the actual title is still being determined). I have lots of thoughts about what I’m hoping to do with the book but wanted to reach out to you, the potential reader, for more feedback; after all, the book will be for you, so I really want to make sure I’m providing everything that people want (which isn’t possible, of course, but I want to get as close as I can). In short, the book will cover everything you need to know to create an e-commerce site using PHP and MySQL. It will not teach either techology, or their installation, as the book will have to assume basic PHP and MySQL (and HTML and CSS) knowledge. So it’s very much an application of the technologies kind of book, like the popular example chapters in my “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide” books.

…

Somewhat randomly I’ve recently come across two very useful articles, each of which contains ten Web development tips. The first is at hackification, and is called Ten Web Development Tips I Wish I’d Known Two Years Ago. This seems to be a generally good blog, with lots of stuff worth reading. In this particular article, I also heartedly agree with the author’s suggestions that you should…

• Use a browser development plug-in, like Firebug and YSlow
• Learn JavaScript

This author also mentions using a reset stylesheet, something I wasn’t familiar with but is also mentioned in…

…the 10 Dirty Little Web Development Tricks article at Yongfook. That author also recommends using a versioning system like SVN (to control the different versions of files as you work with them), which I feel makes more sense if you’re working on something with a team. Along with recommendations to learn the jQuery JavaScript framework and the Zend PHP framework, the author also suggests you take a break, perhaps the best piece of debugging advice that I’ve ever also given (I always include that in my books). There’s also some best-practices there related to using frameworks and MVC approaches to sites.

…

One of my hopes for my (which is, tragically, starting to fill up with actual work) is to learn Flex. In case you’re not familiar with it, Flex is an open source framework created by Adobe, used to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Flex can be used to create SWF files that run through the Flash engine in a Web browser or create AIR files that run through the AIR engine on the desktop. Simply put, Flex is Flash for programmers. As I have little to no graphical skills, it’s a much better candidate for me than Flash. Over the past week I’ve started to finally do something wth Flex, here are my thoughts thus far.

In two previous posts, I discussed analyzing my site using Yahoo!’s YSlow Firefox plug-in. I went through the initial test results and the steps I took to improve my score. At the end of part 2, I was left with a grade of 95 (whohoo!) but still two hurdles: ETags and sending compressed JavaScript and CSS.

I haven’t formally written about MySQL Workbench in any of my books (I don’t think), but wanted to give it a quick mention here. MySQL Workbench is a visual database design application (an entity-relation/modeling tool) for creating and managing database schemas. It runs on many operating systems and is being released in both free and commercial versions.

If you haven’t used a visual database design tool before, you’ll need to spend some time reading up on it. The application can be used to design and then create new databases or create documentation for existing ones. This kind of software is especially useful if you:

• prefer visual design tools
• may need to create databases on one server, then recreate them on another
• want to package along an excellent resource when turning a site over to a client

MySQL Workbench is currently in an alpha release. That means not all of its features are quite there yet and the documentation will need to be much improved (some of the links on MySQL’s pages seem to be inconsistent). But if you have some spare time, you may want to play with this now. If you don’t have the time, or prefer more developed software, keep the MySQL Workbench in mind for later in the year.

…

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, I talked about using Yahoo!’s YSlow Firefox plug-in to analyze and improve your Web site’s speed. In that post I mentioned that my site— www.larryullman.com—fared pretty well (an 86 out of 100) but there were a couple of things that I hadn’t even heard of before. Well, I started making some tweaks, and here’s the result so far, including discussion of CDNs, which were new to me.