In this new post to his blog Padraic Brady takes a quick look at a book by Julien Pauli and Guillaume Poncon - "Zend Framework: Bien developper en PHP".
Weighing in at around 450 pages, the contents table is replete with all the topics one would expect including chapters on MVC in the Zend Framework, all the typical components, and appendices (a lot of appendices!) on topics like MVC Theory, Subversion, Databases, Object Oriented Programming, Testing with PHPUnit, etc. It's a very complete book that should be suitable even for absolute beginners to PHP web application frameworks, or anyone visiting from Ruby/Python/Java.
You can find the book at a local (French) bookseller or it can be ordered online from someplace like Amazon.fr.
The NETTUTS blog has this new tutorial posted (including a screencast) showing how to make a web application similar to the Address Book on Apple's OS X operating system.
As we all know, WordPress is so extensive that you can use it for nearly anything. There are even articles on sites with crazy titles such as 101 alternative uses for WordPress. So I thought, hey, why not? I bet a lot of people want to create their own Web Apps, and essentially WordPress can do that for you. In this video tutorial, we're going to make an online Address Book.
Building on a WordPress base and including jQuery and a Live Search Plugin, they create the multi-pane look and feel, styled largely with CSS. The end result shows your address groups, the members of that group and the selected member's information in the far right pane.
WebReference.com has another excerpt from the Addison-Wesley book "PHP and MySQL Web Development" covering the connection between PHP and MySQL using their example from previous chapters.
In this chapter, we explain how to access the Book-O-Rama database from the Web using PHP. You learn how to read from and write to the database and how to filter potentially troublesome input data.
The chapter looks at setting up the connection, choosing the table, running queries against it, getting the information from the results and using prepared statements to do it all in a bit safer way. They also briefly touch on other interface methods (like the PEAR MDB2 library).
Raphael Stolt has done a review of a book that's helping bridge the gap between Rails and PHP for those already using the PHP language. The book "Rails for PHP Developers" (part of the Pragmatic Programmers series of books, authored by Derek DeVries and Mike Naberezny) is a guide to learning Ruby on Rails from a PHP developer's perspective.
The e-book version of the Pragmatic Programmers release Rails for PHP Developers written by Derek DeVries and Mike Naberezny occupies now some of my scarce hard drive space for several months, and today I managed to hit the last page of it. In case you're interested in knowing if it's worthy to sacrifice some rare hard drive or bookshelf space for this book read on.
He goes through the three parts of the book - a look at the MVC pattern, teaching some of the details of Ruby and comparing the structure of the two languages to help PHP developers relate a bit more. Raphael gives it good marks for being a great guide to not only Ruby and Rails but to also making it accessible for PHP developers to make a smoother transition from one to the other if they're interested.
On the Ibuildings blog today Marcello Duarte has a new review of the Packt Publishing book "PHP5 CMS Framework Development" (by Martin Brampton).
Martin left Mambo (before they announced to drop support for PHP4 last September) to write his own CMS and "evolve out of the Mambo history", by taking advantage of PHP5 OO enhancements. The result is Aliro: a CMS, a framework and an extension project with traits and genes of the Mambo family. Aliro code is used throughout the book to support and illustrate his presentation.
Topics of the different chapters include basic CMS system needs, organizing code, extensions and editing and presenting content.
Packt Publishing has made an announcement about a new book that's just been released - "MediaWiki Skins Design" (by Richard Carter).
From their release notes:
This book takes users through customizing their MediaWiki skin. It is full of practical examples of MediaWiki skinning techniques, and provides a clear explanation of how MediaWiki skinning works and the necessary template and CSS customizations required to completely alter MediaWiki's appearance.
The book has appeal for both web developers and wiki administrators by helping them update the look and feel of their MediaWiki site. You can find more information on the book on its page on the Packt Publishing website.
Jonathan Snook has written up a book review of a recent Packt Publishing book "CakePHP Application Development".
The folks at Packt were kind enough to send me a copy and it turned out to be a fairly quick read. It's 300 pages of good starting knowledge. The book is targeted as an introduction to the framework and not meant as a definitive guide (to which the book would likely need to be three times the size to accomplish).
He details some of the contents of the book (not chapter by chapter though) and some of the things that did and didn't work.
Chris Hartjes has posted a review of one of the many PHP books that Packt Publishing has to offer - "CakePHP Application Development".
A few weeks ago I was approached by Pakt Publishing and asked if I was interested in reviewing the recent CakePHP book 'CakePHP Application Development' by Ahsanul Bari and Anupom Syam. [...] Naturally, several books about the framework have been published in the past few months, and I can't think of a better book to recommend to people interested in learning the framework than this one.
He looks at some of "The Good" (like the sample applications and examples the book provides) and some of "The Bad" where it falls a bit short (like the lack of good server config information and no mention of the built-in testing functionality) to the obvious "Ugly" - that CakePHP, like any other framework out there, is a constantly moving target that's hard to pin down in a book that takes months to write and print.
David Goodwin has posted a new book review of a PHP book offered by Packt Publishing (released Sept 22, 2007) - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects" by Shu-Wai Chow.
Some time ago, Packt publishing sent me this book to review. Here it is, being somewhat overdue!
He talks about the book's contents - the different chapters detailing the different services' APIs, the protocols that are used to talk to those services and the data formats your scripts would have to be able to talk in to communicate. He recommends the book to those looking to get started with mashups specifically, but warns that in some places the book tends to "reinvent the wheel" rather than using classes/packages that already exist.
The book was published prior to Facebook's facelift but this doesn't really impact on the usefulness of the book. An overview of FBML, FQL, FBJS (a restricted subset of JavaScript and enforced for security reasons) are given along with information on how to use the test consoles, publish to news feeds, some multimedia aspects of what can be done in Facebook applications and more.
He notes that the book focuses on a PHP5-only world for developing the apps and opts for MySQL as the database of choice. Overall, he found it useful - more so than the online documentation, especially for beginners.
