My publisher, Peachpit Press, has a 68% sale price on the eBook of my “PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide” this week. This is my beginner’s guide to programming with PHP, intended for those without any programming experience. This is the fourth edition, which came out last year. The sale price is good until the end of day tomorrow (Saturday, December 8th, PST).
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For many of my books, bonus content is made available through the publisher. Sometimes this is material that was intended for the book but had to be cut, such as an appendix or a chapter, and sometimes the material is a true bonus, such as a video screencast. Because it’s not clear for everyone how to access this bonus material, I thought I’d quickly post instructions here.
- Head to Peachpit.com (almost all of my books are published by Peachpit Press)
- Click on Account Sign In at the top of the page.
- If you don’t already have an account with Peachpit.com, click the Create a new one… link to register.
- After you have registered, login.
- On your account page (after logging in), click Registered Products.
- On the Registered Products tab, click Register Another Product.
- Follow the instructions to register the book.
- Return to the Registered Products page.
- For the book in question, click the Access Bonus Content link. That will take you to a page with all the bonus content for a given book.
Besides being able to access bonus content, there are other benefits to registering at Peachpit’s site. And while you’re there, you can also check out my author page, which lists the books I’ve written for Peachpit, the articles I’ve published there, and the blog postings I’ve published there. Both the articles and blog postings are viewable without registration or logging in.
I hope that helps anyone having trouble finding the material they’re looking for.
In this edition…
- About This Newsletter
- What Were You Thinking? => The JavaScript Book
- On the Web => Flash Builder 4.5/Flex 4.5 for Mobile Apps
- On the Blog => Cookies and Sessions in Yii
- On the Forum => FALSE Comparisons in PHP
- Q&A => Could You Say More About Stored Procedures?
- What is Larry Thinking => Doing What I Do: Web Development
- Larry Ullman’s Book News => “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites” (4th Edition) and “Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design”
I’m very pleased to say that the fourth edition of my first book, “PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide,” is now available. This book was written for the average computer user wanting to begin developing dynamic Web sites. No prior programming experience is assumed, although you should already be familiar with the basics of HTML. The focus of the book is the PHP language itself, but two chapters introduce MySQL and SQL, in order to start using a database backend.
With the fourth edition of the book, I started by fixing any minor problems and updating the code for the latest version of PHP. New in this edition is a “Review and Pursue” section at the end of
each chapter. The review prompts revisit the chapter’s key points. The pursue prompts are specific recommendations for how to apply what you just learned on your own. As with any of the book’s material, you can turn to the book’s supporting forum for help or feedback on the “Review and Pursue” section.
Also new in this edition is an added chapter, called “Putting It All Together.” The chapter demonstrates how to use everything covered in the book to assemble a mini-Web application, with authentication and full CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete) functionality.
At the time of this writing, Amazon is selling the book for $25.06. I don’t currently know when it will be available in other languages, countries, or formats.
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.
- How HTML5 will Change the Web is a discussion as to what impact the author thinks HTML5 will have on the Web.
- HTML5 Security Facts Developers Should Keep in Mind is just what the title says.
- HTML5 for Web Designers by A List Apart
- CNET’s got an article titled Marketing Departments Abscond with ‘HTML5’, largely about how Apple is presenting the standard, to their own benefit.
- A fascinating, short read on Infoworld
Finally, to see how your browser does with HTML5’s expected new features, check out The HTML5 Test.
All of this is in my mind lately, as I just started writing the fourth edition of my “PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide” book, and I had to decide what version of HTML or XHTML to use. I very strongly considered switching to HTML5, at the very least because HTML5 is so much easier to code (check out the basic syntax of an HTML5 document and compare it with, say, an XHTML 1.0 Transitional one). But I couldn’t in good conscience suggest the reader use something that’s not officially released yet, will work unpredictably on multiple browsers, and could change in any number of ways before the final release comes out. All this is even more true after the bit of a debacle I had trying to use PHP 6 with another book! So the book uses XHTML, as did the previous edition, but clearly HTML5 is the biggest change in Web development since…I dunno…but when HTML5 does officially come out, it will have an impact.
