Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: From Novice to Professional) Review

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Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: From Novice to Professional) Review[Updated for Second Edition]
A beginning PHP book, not a beginning programming book. The subtitle, 'From Novice to Professional', can be a tad misleading for the novice coder. A beginning programming book covers a lot of material that this book assumes the reader already understands. Many software books include a 'Who Is This Book For' section that offers some guidance on the suitable reader knowledge level, not this one.
That said, I found this book to be very helpful. The sections on installing and configuring Apache, PHP and MySQL certainly saved me many hours of reading the online documentation and tweaking of settings while setting up my local test bed. That, in itself, made me a very happy camper. The author goes on to cover the various aspects from the basics of the PHP language and class libraries to topics like Authentication, Security, Session Handlers and eMail functionality that help anyone new to PHP setup some fairly sophisticated site capabilities.
The second edition has been supplemented with an added 200 pages, including a new section on PEAR (PHP Extension and Application Repository). This is a wealth of prewritten classes and packages that can be used to add even more sophisticated functionality to the novice's web development toolbox. The author demonstrates several of the more prominent packages.
The second edition has greatly beefed up with additional coverage of MySQL 5, including chapters on stored procedures, triggers and the PHP mysqli extension (all missed in the first edition). Most of the examples offered are clean and general enough to be useful templates for the reader's tailoring.
My suggestion for novices to PHP is read through chapter 9, then skip to the various sections that solve specific problems being faced or are of particular interest, including installing and configuring your local test bed.
Bottom line, the first edition was a good book for intermediate to veteran programmers looking for a quick tutorial on PHP (circa version 5.0); the second edition is even better. Novice programmers should ensure that they have a full understanding of the basics of programming (and OOP) before attempting it. I would now use this book to teach a class on PHP.
P-)Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: From Novice to Professional) Overview

Written for the budding web developer searching for a powerful, low-cost solution for building flexible, dynamic web sites.
Essentially three books in one: provides thorough introductions to the PHP language and the MySQL database, and shows you how these two technologies can be effectively integrated to build powerful websites.
Provides over 500 code examples, including real-world tasks such as creating an auto-login feature, sending HTML-formatted e-mail, testing password guessability, and uploading files via a web interface.
Updated for MySQL 5, includes new chapters introducing triggers, stored procedures, and views.



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Practical RichFaces Review

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Practical RichFaces ReviewFor as big an impact RichFaces and Ajax4jsf have had on JSF adoption, there's no question that there has been a dearth of good documentation on the subject. So how practice is RichFaces, really? That's the question Max Katz answers in his recently released Apress book, Practical RichFaces. At last, the missing manual has been discovered!
If you have ever perused the RichFaces documentation, you'll agree that it leaves out the bigger picture of how RichFaces works, in particular the underlying Ajax4jsf mechanism (i.e., the behavior provided by ). I can attest to the observation the author states in the introduction that a lot of developers are using the tags and attributes from RichFaces without a clear understanding of their purpose and, as such, only arrive at a working application through trial and error. After reading Practice RichFaces, and keeping it close at hand, you can finally put those painstaking steps aside and know what you are doing from the start.
The book starts out with one of the most clear and concise explanations of JSF that I have come across. You learn that Ajax and JSF are a good fit for one another and the combination allows you to do Ajax without having to suffer the headache of coding JavaScript and dealing with browser inconsistencies.
The author then sets the record straight about the origins of RichFaces and its relationship with Ajax4jsf. You learn that there is a clear distinction between the tags in the a4j: and rich: namespaces. Specifically, the a4j: tags provide page-level Ajax support whereas the rich: tags provide component-level Ajax support. As you learn about both tag sets, you begin to appreciate how easily you can add Ajax and partial page updates to your application using RichFaces. You can practically feel yourself maturing as a developer and eager to start adding more sophisticated user interfaces that give your application a desktop feel.
If you are seeking answers to specific questions you have about certain Ajax4jsf tags, I can assure you that you will find them in this book. Let me cite a couple of examples. Early on in the book, the author provides an explanation as to why content that was not rendered on an initial request cannot be rendered during a partial page update without a placeholder. This is a common problem that comes up as soon as the developer tries to use Ajax for input field validation. There is good coverage of the ajaxKeys attribute for updating individual rows in a UIData component, a very compelling feature of RichFaces in terms of performance. You also learn how to use the tag to create a wizard in a single-page application while still being able to leverage the JSF navigation rules.
Most important of all, you learn about the multitude of options you have to control the Ajax request, such as explicitly marking which regions of the page to update or instructing a region to update itself automatically on any Ajax request, adding an activity indicator to show when an Ajax request is in progress, submitting only a part of the form (i.e, processing only a subset of UIInput components on the server), bypassing model updates, queuing Ajax requests to avoid flooding the server, and discarding duplicate page updates. You even learn how to create a JavaScript function which behind the scenes executes a method on the server and subsequently performs a partial page update, separating the Ajax4jsf mechanism from any one component.
Although I have been using RichFaces for several years, I learned many things about RichFaces and even corrected some mistaken assumptions I had.
You are constantly reminded in the book that skinning is covered in chapter 11, almost to the point where you want to just skip to the chapter and get it over with. The coverage of skinning is pretty good, though a thorough explanation of the XCSS files and how they tie into the theme is sorely missed. There are other important areas of RichFaces that didn't make it into this book. There is no coverage of the drag and drop components nor, as mentioned earlier, the resource delivery framework. The section on developing a custom tree is fairly thin and, coming from experience, it turns out to be a lot more difficult than it appears. So while this book serves as a vital resource for understanding the fundamentals of how RichFaces works, there is still room for a book further along in the progression.
Despite providing a clear picture of how RichFaces works, the book has a number typos, broken grammar, incorrect code formatting, and mixed up code and diagram references, sadly a shortcoming of the RichFaces developer documentation as well. Likely you'll be able to read around the mistakes, though, and understand what was intended. I just wish more care had been taken to polish the manuscript and the code listings.
While Practical RichFaces is an excellent resource if you are developing an application using RichFaces, or you want to add Ajax capability to an existing JSF application, do not expect to find the information you need if you are planning to develop custom RichFaces components. The book lacks coverage of the RichFaces Component Development Kit (CDK) and the excellent resource delivery mechanism in RichFaces that supplies the assets (images, JavaScript, CSS) needed by the rich components. For this reason, the target audience of this book should be identified as the application developer, not the component developer, citing roles defined in the JSF specification.
As well as the author does explaining the concepts, tags, and tag attributes in RichFaces, the fact remains that RichFaces has several bizarre tag and attribute names that cause confusion for the developer. One example is the tag. Keep-Alive is an HTTP header that specifies to the browser how to control the connection. But the tag has nothing to do with this header. This tag stores the value resolved by a value expression in the UI component tree so that it's available on postback. This is just one example of how RichFaces is a bit rough around the edges. I'm hopeful that RichFaces 4 will align the excellent concepts in RichFaces under a better naming strategy. Of course, given that the names are not always intuitive, it makes this book an even more critical resource to you as a developer.
Looking beyond these technicalities aside, it's my recommendation that if you are using RichFaces, you should definitely take the opportunity to read this book.Practical RichFaces OverviewThis book illustrates how to use the RichFaces, a JSF component library that makes it easy to add Ajax to Java applications. JSF is the Java standard for component-based frameworks on the web, and libraries like this bring JSF's capabilities up to what users expect from modern web applications. The focus is on how to quickly use the RichFaces capabilities to radically change the look and responsiveness of application.

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JBoss at Work: A Practical Guide Review

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JBoss at Work: A Practical Guide ReviewThe subtitle for this book is "A Practical Guide." That subtitle is perfect. This is one of the most immediately useful and practical books I've read in a long time. I began using JBoss at the same time I started reading this book and I appreciated that the book started out with the relatively simple task of getting JBoss installed. However, while the book starts at an introductory level it doesn't stay there. It progresses through more advanced topics such as JMS, JavaMail, JAAS, and Web Services.
The writing is clear and enjoyable throughout. An extended example of a car dealer carries forward throughout the book. This helps the concepts fit together and build upon one another. JBoss at Work is highly informative and, as its subtitle promises, a practical guide. I highly recommend it.JBoss at Work: A Practical Guide Overview
Consisting of a number of well-known open source products, JBoss is more a family of interrelated services than a single monolithic application.But, as with any tool that's as feature-rich as JBoss, there are number of pitfalls and complexities, too.

Most developers struggle with the same issues when deploying J2EE applications on JBoss: they have trouble getting the many J2EE and JBoss deployment descriptors to work together; they have difficulty finding out how to get started; their projects don't have a packaging and deployment strategy that grows with the application; or, they find the Class Loaders confusing and don't know how to use them, which can cause problems.

JBoss at Work: A Practical Guide helps developers overcome these challenges. As you work through the book, you'll build a project using extensive code examples.You'll delve into all the major facets of J2EE application deployment on JBoss, including JSPs, Servlets, EJBs, JMS, JNDI, web services, JavaMail, JDBC, and Hibernate. With the help of this book, you'll:

Implement a full J2EE application and deploy it on JBoss
Discover how to use the latest features of JBoss 4 and J2EE 1.4, including J2EE-compliant web services
Master J2EE application deployment on JBoss with EARs, WARs, and EJB JARs
Understand the core J2EE deployment descriptors and how they integrate with JBoss-specific descriptors
Base your security strategy on JAAS

Written for Java developers who want to use JBoss on their projects, the book covers the gamut of deploying J2EE technologies on JBoss, providing a brief survey of each subject aimed at the working professional with limited time.

If you're one of the legions of developers who have decided to give JBoss a try, then JBoss at Work: A Practical Guide is your next logical purchase.It'll show you in plain language how to use the fastest growing open source tool in the industry today. If you've worked with JBoss before, this book will get you up to speed on JBoss 4, JBoss WS (web services), and Hibernate 3.


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Using Drupal Review

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Using Drupal ReviewThis book has been eagerly awaited as the first O'Reilly volume covering Drupal, and having been written by such a rockstar team of Drupal pros.
It's also the first book to focus on a wide range of third party contributed modules rather than just Drupal core, or a narrow subject area of modules. It's written for Drupal 6, although the book would be fairly applicable to Drupal 5 (with the caveat that one of the major modules, Views, is completely different for Drupal 6 - the underlying concepts are similar though).
The first thing that struck me about this book is its fundamentally different approach from most early Drupal books, as well as the kinds of books you find in the early stages of any new technology's mainstream acceptance. It's not simply a higher quality rehashing of handbook pages and technical how-tos, but it has an incredibly cohesive and clever process through the entire book.
Every main chapter of the book will:
* Introduce an example scenario that's easy to relate to. For example, an early chapter that covers creating a simple site for a Mom & Pop shop has this sample case study: "in order to update the web page content each week, they currently pay their next-door neighbor Goldie to hand-edit the page"
* Outline what you're going to be building
* Explain why certain decisions or trade-offs were made when creating this site, and highlight alternative choices depending on your particular situation
* Explains step-by-step how to complete the site with lots of tables and screenshots, pointing out gotchas and important concepts along the way
* Ends with a "Taking It Further" section with suggestions for other features or future modules to watch that are related to the site recipe
The hands-on approach of this book takes you through a single, cohesive example in each chapter. This gets you building a site to completion at every step. This approach reminds me of the different ways to learn a musical instrument such as piano or guitar - you can start with theory and technique and practice your scales first, or you can just learn some chords and be able to whip out a few simple pop songs your first afternoon. This book is the chords.
It also has some great moments of explaining fuzzy concepts that are difficult to understand without significant Drupal experience. The Using Drupal team shows their years of expertise training users and implementing Drupal sites in gems such as this, describing whether you should use taxonomy or a CCK field for content categorization:
A general rule of thumb is that if you can remove the field and the content type still makes sense, use Taxonomy. An article filed under a "Technology" category is still an article if you remove the category association, so Taxonomy is a good fit. If the field is part of a piece of content, such as an album's recording artist, then CCK is generally a better choice.

Using Drupal will take you through building a:
* Simple website with blog for a mom & pop grocery store, including a WYSIWYG editor and uploading images to content
* Job posting board for a university, which introduces the key CCK and Views modules
* Product reviews site with user ratings, Amazon product data importing, some simple CSS tweaks using the CSS Injector module, and more CCK/Views
* Wiki, which brings in revisions, input formats, and Pathauto module
* Local arts news site, which takes you into Actions, Triggers, Workspace, Workflow (both as a concept and module), and Views Bulk Operations to create an administration page
* Photo gallery, with ImageField, ImageCache, much more Views and some site display tweaks
* Multilingual website with a strong overview of concepts, then Locale, i18n, and the Localization Client
* Event management site with calendar and attendees
* Online store using Ubercart (focuses on basic store setup, products, attributes, and orders - you'll still need to set up payment methods)
It also covers a few additional topics:
* An overview of Drupal, and where to get help
* Basic theming (this is the only time you'll see code!)
* Installing and upgrading Drupal and modules
* How to choose modules and participate in the community
So what's it missing?
Obviously Using Drupal only scratches the surface of the many, many types of sites you can build with Drupal. There are a few major topics you won't find covered in here - membership sites with protected user access, Organic Groups (a chapter that didn't quite make it due to module readiness for D6), more advanced magazine/newspaper-style sites with modules like Node Queue and Panels, multimedia (there's another book for that!), or social networking sites. However, I think they picked a great selection of site recipes to cover in a relatively small amount of space, and each recipe will get you a solid site built.
The book will also direct you to two additional resources available online: the finished demo site for each chapter for you to browse, and a download package containing installation profiles with the same versions of modules and themes used on each site. The installation profiles will set you up with a clean slate with your modules all prepared for you to start following along step-by-step in each chapter.
Other things I really love about this book:
* It isn't afraid to recommend helpful modules early, such as Administration Menu
* It highlights common newbie gotchas, such as using the blog module when you really want a story
* It points out future modules or alternatives to watch, for example, the WYSIWYG API
* It gives contrib modules such as CCK and Views the foregrounding they deserve when learning Drupal
This is the book I wish I had when learning Drupal. We're even giving away copies of it at [...] because we love it so much. I would recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone new to Drupal, intermediate users who want to take their skills to the next level or brush up on Drupal 6/Views 2, or anyone who actually needs to build a site similar to the recipes listed above. And, y'know, anyone else who's ever built or wanted to build a website :)Using Drupal Overview
With the recipes in this book, you can take full advantage of the vast collection of community-contributed modules that make the Drupal web framework useful and unique. You'll get the information you need about how to combine modules in interesting ways (with a minimum of code-wrangling) to develop a variety of community-driven websites. Each chapter describes a case study and outlines specific requirements for one of several projects included in the book -- a wiki, publishing workflow site, photo gallery, product review site, online store, user group site, and more. With Using Drupal, you will:

Get an overview of Drupal concepts and key modules introduced in each chapter, with a bird's-eye view of each module's specialty and how it works
Explore various solutions within Drupal that meet the requirements for the project, with details about which modules are selected and why
Learn how to configure modules, with step-by-step recipes for building the precise functionality the project requires
Get information on additional modules that will make the project even more powerful
Be able to access the modules used in the chapter, along with other resources

Newcomers will find a thorough introduction to the framework, while experienced Drupal developers will learn best practices for building powerful websites. With Using Drupal, you'll find concrete and creative solutions for developing the exact community website you have in mind.


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Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, 2nd Edition Review

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Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, 2nd Edition ReviewI have just started learning some PHP & MySQL development using "PHP & MySQL Web Development" published by Sams and "Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL" from O'Reilly. Prospective readers might be wondering the difference between the two in deciding which one to buy, so I hope to shed some light on the issue.
Sams: The Welling and Thomson book is more "hands-on" in that it takes the reader step-by-step in developing an e-commerce website. The chapters are organized in a goal-oriented manner: PHP, MySQL, the basics of e-commerce, security, and design of the site.
O'Reilly: The Williams and Lane book is structured in a similar way by showing readers PHP and then MySQL. Examples to reinforce concepts are also provided. While the O'Reilly book also tries to take the reader in developing an e-commerce site, it is a bit more theoretical. Also, there are some differences in focus: the O'Reilly book has a section on using JavaScript while the Sams book has a final chapter on creating PDF files using PHP.
If I had to choose just one book, I would go with the Sams book due to its more gentle learning curve. However, I believe that the O'Reilly book is no slouch, and I will probably come to appreciate it more once I gain more experience in PHP and MySQL development.
One last word about my programming background: I knew a bit of Perl, Java, HTML, and JavaScript before tackling PHP and MySQL. I consider myself to be an "advanced beginner" (an oxymoron, of course). To get the most out of these two books, you should know HTML well enough to read it (you should at least recognize some tags) and it would definitely be helpful if you have some programming experience. You could very well make PHP your first programming language, but I would advise against it. Start with something like Perl (whose syntax is very similar to PHP's).
I highly recommend both books to prospective PHP and MySQL developers who are willing to spend some time and effort.Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, 2nd Edition Overview

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Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer's Guide to SEO Review

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Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer's Guide to SEO ReviewCreating a website that can be found among all the other sites on the web has always been important to the success of any site. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is as important to the marketing of a website as image optimization is to its graphic design. For dynamic-driven websites such as BellaOnline, it is a continuous challenge to maintain search engine optimization. This book by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie is written for the PHP programmer who needs to understand the many technical issues involved when programming a search-engine-friendly site from attracting search engine spiders to site promotion. Throughout the book, you will find code examples and practice exercises which show how to implement the techniques covered in the book.
The authors begin with a discussion of the programming environment including setting up the MySQL server and then move on to tools and resources for the IT professional and the basics of search engine optimization. One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization is the URL. The URLs that you generate for your pages must not only be search engine friendly but also people friendly. The authors discuss how to make the task of creating and managing search-engine-friendly URLs easier. Another problem you will encounter is duplicate content which will harm your site's search engine rating. The authors discuss many ways to prevent or minimize this problem such as using robots.txt and meta exclusion.
Your site visitors enjoy those cool looking interactive features, such as fancy menus, that can be created using JavaScript, Ajax and Flash. These same features make it difficult for search engines to find your site. However, web readers have come to expect a certain amount of interactivity and without at least a few of these goodies, your site will be bland by today's standards. The authors discuss this problem and cover several ways to help such as generating SEO images and the use of graphic text.
One of the most popular ways to promote a website is with RSS feeds and syndication. To be effective, these feeds must be updated as new content is added to your site. This can be time consuming especially if your site is updated several times a minute. Two answers to this problem offered by the authors are to automate the generation of RSS feeds with a PHP class and displaying feeds with SimplePie.
A standard for a good search engine friendly site is a good sitemap system. As with RSS feeds, keeping a sitemap updated can be a challenge and the authors show you how to create a traditional and an XML-based sitemap. Once your site is live, your job as an IT professional has just begun. There are many SEO technical issues the authors touch on including maintaining your site, changing hosts and cross linking.
One thing that makes a technical-heavy book like this more helpful is a working example that incorporates what you have learned. The case study for this book is an E-commerce store and catalog. The authors have also covered how to enhance a pre-existing site to be more search engine friendly and how to create a search engine optimized blog using WordPress.
Jaimie Sirovich is a search engine marketing consultant, programmer and administrator for the search engine marketing blog SEOEgghead. Cristian Darie is a software engineer and author of several books and tutorials on AJAX, ASP.NET, PHP and SQL. [...]Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer's Guide to SEO OverviewMaybe you're a great programmer or IT professional, but marketing isn't your thing. Or perhaps you're a tech-savvy search engine marketer who wants a peek under the hood of a search engine optimized web site. Search engine marketing is a field where technology and marketing are both critical and interdependent, because small changes in the implementation of a web site can make you or break you in search engine rankings. Furthermore, the fusion of technology and marketing know-how can create web site features that attract more visitors.
The mission of this book is to help web developers create web sites that rank well with the major search engines, and to teach search engine marketers how to use technology to their advantage. We assert that neither marketing nor IT can exist in a vacuum, and it is essential that they not see themselves as opposing forces in an organization. They must work together. This book aims to educate both sides in that regard.

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