Archives For book

I am pleased to announce that I’ve just signed a contract to write the second edition of my “Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL” book, published by New Riders. The first edition was written in the fall of 2010, and has been very well received (out of 22 reviews at Amazon, 18 are 5-star). There was more I wanted to do in the first edition, and a few things have changed since the book was written, so my publisher and I felt it was time for a revision. I’ll be writing the book at the end of the summer and early fall (after I complete “The Yii Book”), with a release date in October or November.

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One of the problems with technical writing is that the instructions you provide will eventually become outdated. Some details, such as the fundamentals of a programming language like C, Ruby, or PHP, change relatively slowly. Others, like libraries, frameworks, and browsers, change frequently. And so, it was not surprising to find out that PayPal changed some of their systems a while back in a way that will affect readers of my “Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL” book. This issue first appeared last summer in my support forums, with Sean and Michael discovering the problem and the solution.

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So progress on “The Yii Book” in the past month has not gone as well as I would have liked. And, sadly, progress has been poor for no particular reason other than my own ability to get things done. These things do happen to us all, but it doesn’t mean I’m happy about. Still, even though it’s been slow, progress is being made. A quick status report…

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I’m working on Part 3 of “The Yii Book”, and have made reference to the fact that I’ve been working on Chapter 15, “Internationalization,” and Chapter 16, “Leaving the Browser.” These are not the original chapters, per the first table of contents. Here, then, is an updated table of contents. These are still subject to change, but considering there’s not that much of the book left, there probably won’t be any dramatic changes.

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To be as frank and clear as I can, if you’re interesting in self-publishing at all, you must buy the book “APE: How to Publish a Book by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch”. No, I have not read every book on self-publishing that exists, but I doubt there are any as good and as thorough as APE, let alone better.

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