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  • Ken Snyder 5:11 on Saturday, 26 February 2005 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Professional PHP5 

    This is an awesome book that I would highly recommend. I am the type of person who learns well by considering how things fit into the big picture. Professional PHP5 really does a great job of describing the issues of PHP software design in its most structured forms.

    Professional PHP5 starts with PHP5 Object Orientation Programming (OOP) concepts and moves into the ideas of broad patterns and toolkits. They provide code you can tryout yourself; doing is of course the best way to learn.

    You can build a tool kit with useful collection classes, generic object classes, communication classes, debugging classes, and abstract classes. You can learn the practical and ideal implementations of a Model View Controller pattern and Unit Testing. You can get a feel for SOAP, the finite state machine, and PHP session handling.

    The book also has great tips and examples of project management, system design and planning, quality testing, and deployment.

    It is a really great book for a wide audience, and I’d recommend it for serious PHP programmers.

    View Amazon Summary �

    Professional PHP5
    Author: Edward Lecky-Thompson, Heow Eide-Goodman, Steven D. Nowicki, and Alec Cove
    Publisher: Wrox Publishing
    Published: November 2004
    ISBN: 0764572822
    Pages: 662
    Rating:

     

  • thebigdog 10:42 on Thursday, 11 November 2004 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Eclipse In Action 

    I reviewed Eclipse In Action to familiarize myself with the IDE Eclipse. My main focus while reading the book was to learn all I can about developing with Eclipse. I wanted to be able to utilize all the features that Eclipse has to offer, not only in terms of Java developer, but also as a web developer. However, I want to point out that this book is “A Guide for Java Developers”?. So the target audience is for a Java Developer.

    The book starts out with a great introduction into Eclipse and the how the IDE comes together in the workbench. Then it moves right into the Java development with Eclipse. It wastes no time getting to the meat of development with Junit, Log4j, testing, debugging, and Ant integration. Not to mention a chapter on CVS integration. The book has everything that a developer needs during the development life cycle of their project. The authors do a great job in adding additional information on the features that Eclipse has to offer to help alleviate the remedial tasks during development. Many of these features can be used outside of Java development.

    Part 2 of Eclipse In Action deals with extending Eclipse and creating Eclipse plugins (the foundation of Eclipse). These chapters give a great novice introduction into Eclipse plugin development; however, there seems to be lacking detail into SWT/JFace and advanced plugin development.

    Overall Eclipse In Action provides an indepth look into the Eclipse IDE. I would recommend this book to anyone that want to use Eclipse as their IDE. I have been using Eclipse for over a year now and I use it for all languages I develop with, like Java and PHP. Though the book focuses on the Java Developer, this also lends it way into development with other languages.

    Eclipse In Action: A Guide for Java Developers
    Author: David Gallardo, Ed Burnette and Robert McGovern
    Publisher: Manning Publications
    Published: May 2003
    ISBN: 1930110960
    Pages: 416
    Rating: * * * *

     

  • thebigdog 12:37 on Saturday, 23 October 2004 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Learning XML 

    As an XML developer I spend most of my time working with XML and technologies related to XML. I began reading “Learning XML” with the mindset of finding new and interesting topics. Erik Ray provided some great reading on such topics as Schema, RELAX NG, and Schematron.

    I found the first few chapters (1-4) to be a great review, covering basics and key concepts of XML. Mr. Ray does a fantastic job at explaining and providing examples that illustrate basic and complex syntax of XML. He also lets the reader know if there are additional items to discuss later in future chapters. This allowed me to skip forward and review those sections.

    Even though I have many years of experience with XML, I never found “Learning XML” dull or boring in the least regard. “Learning XML” continued to provide information that allowed me to read on with interest.

    The author also takes the reader into other XML technologies like XPath, XSLT, and XSL-FO. There are many books out there that deal with each of these technologies individually, yet the author provides a strong introduction and foundation to these technologies.

    Some of my favorite sections deal with DOM, SAX, pull parsing, DTDs, and Unicode of XML documents.

    Even though this book provides tons of satisfying examples, I was really looking forward to at least one chapter on advanced topics or theory. However to my dismay there was not one. Overall, Erik Ray does a great job in presenting, explaining and demonstrating XML and XML technologies to his readers. I encourage anyone that is looking for a great book on XML to check out “Learning XML”.

    Learning XML, Second Edition
    Author: Erik T. Ray
    Publisher: O’Reilly
    Published: September 2003
    ISBN: 0-596-00420-6
    Pages: 416
    Rating: * * *

     

  • thebigdog 0:52 on Sunday, 26 September 2004 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd edition 

    To cut to the chase, I heartily recommend this book. Any serious web server admin should have a copy of this book — I’ve found it indispensable, and refer to it often. They’re not exaggerating when they call it “The Definitive Guide”

    Billed as, “Vital information for Apache Programmers and administrators,” this book is definitely geared toward that audience — programmers and admins. That said, the first chapter, “Getting Started,” provides an excellent overview of basic web server concepts that most newbies could understand.

    What I liked
    I liked almost everything! I found the first half of the book (chapters 1-12) the most useful. These chapters covered just about everything you’d want to know about configuring and running apache. Beyond just the basics, the book covers in depth: virtual hosts, authentication, content description and modification, indexing, redirection, proxying, logging, security, and running a big web site. I came away with a much higher level of respect for Apache’s capabilities — I was really surprised how much I didn’t know about Apache, and how much this book could tell me.

    Additionally, there was a very interesting section on writing modules for Apache which, though a little beyond my expertise, gave me a better understanding of Apache’s inner workings.

    Disappointments
    My biggest disappointment with the book was that it dealt so little with PHP, which only got 6 pages. I would have been less disappointed if they hadn’t 50-plus pages to CGI/Perl and 17 pages to Java. Additionally, their XML section dealt almost entirely with Perl and Java, ignoring PHP. Granted, this isn’t a PHP-specific book, but (considering I got the book via a PHP user group) I hoped for equal coverage.

    Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition
    Author: Ben Laurie, Peter Laurie
    ISBN: 0-596-00203-3
    Publisher: O’Reilly
    Published: December 2002
    Pages: 588
    Rating: * * * * *

     

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