If you’re in the United States and own a Kindle, you can now get PHP Solutions, PHP Object-Oriented Solutions, and Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8 delivered wirelessly to you in just a minute after placing your order on Amazon.com. This means that most of my books are now available on Kindle.
The only recent ones not yet available on Kindle are The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 and The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4. Both are long and contain a large number of screenshots, so it might take some time to convert them. Once they are, though, I’m sure Kindle owners will be delighted at no longer needing to lug such heavy books around. 
I only wish that Amazon would make Kindle available in Europe (and other parts of the world), too. I’ve been itching to get my hands on a Kindle.
March 20th, 2009
My publisher, friends of ED, is feeling in a generous mood. Each Thursday until further notice, it’s offering a selected friends of ED eBook for just $10. The catch? You have to snag it within 24 hours. This week’s $10 offer is Web Development Solutions: Ajax, APIs, Libraries, and Hosted Services Made Easy by Mark ‘Norm’ Norman Francis and Christian Heilmann. The clock started ticking at 0800 UTC, so go grab it while you can. And don’t forget to check http://friendsofed.com/dotw/ each Thursday to see the Deal of the Week.
March 5th, 2009
O’Reilly, the leading computer book publisher, has posted the results of a detailed analysis of the state of the computer book market in 2008. What both surprised and delighted me is the revelation that my book, The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP is listed by O’Reilly as the number 3 best seller in what it calls the Large Programming Languages category.
O’Reilly classifies a programming language as “large” if more than 100,000 copies of books dedicated to that language sell during the year. That’s the total for all titles, not how many copies of each book that sell. (more…)
February 27th, 2009
The problem I reported yesterday with the friendsofed.com domain appears to have been resolved, and the main website is now back online. To get the source code for my books, go to the friends of ED downloads page, and select the link for the relevant book. The books are listed alphabetically using the full title, so for example The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4 is listed under T, not under E. You can also get the source code from my site, as indicated in yesterday’s post.
If you’re contemplating buying one of my books, and want a better idea of what they’re like, sample chapters in PDF format are available for each title. Just go to the list of web design books at friends of ED, and click the link for the title you’re interested in. This brings up a description of the book; you can download the sample chapter from the links on the right.
February 22nd, 2009
Normally, the source code for my books is available from the downloads page of the friends of ED website. However, there appears to be a problem with the friendsofed.com domain registration, and the site is currently offline. I have no idea how long it will take friends of ED to get back online, so I have uploaded the source files for my Dreamweaver and PHP books to my website (foundationphp.com).
You can find a link to the zip file for each book at the bottom of the following pages (files added for “Foundation PHP 5 for Flash”):
The problem with the main friends of ED website does not affect the friends of ED forum, where you can post any questions about the books and any problems you might encounter.
February 21st, 2009
In my experience, Dreamweaver is a very stable program; but like all software, it occasionally misbehaves. There have been a lot of reports recently about Dreamweaver crashing on start up. Nearly everyone affected is using an Acer computer. Apparently, there’s a known conflict between Dreamweaver and Acer eDataSecurity Management v3.0. If you’re on an Acer, and Dreamweaver won’t start, download the patch from http://www.egistec.com/oem-acer001/program-update.html.
Most of the time, however, the cause is a corrupted cache file called WinFileCache-********.dat or MacFileCache-********.dat inside your personal Dreamweaver configuration folder (the asterisks represent a series of letters and numbers that might differ from computer to computer). The solution is quite simple: close Dreamweaver and delete WinFileCache-********.dat or MacFileCache-********.dat, depending on your operating system.
The location of the personal configuration folder depends on your operating system and version of Dreamweaver. For Dreamweaver CS4, it’s as follows:
- Vista: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver CS4\<language>\Configuration
- Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Adobe\Dreamweaver CS4\<language>\Configuration
- Mac OS X: Macintosh HD:<username>:Library:Application Support:Adobe:Dreamweaver CS4:<language>:Configuration
In all cases, <username> is the name of your user account on the computer and <language> indicates the language of your operating system. The language is usually represented by two pairs of characters separated by an underscore, as in en_US (English), es_ES (Spanish), or fr_FR (French).
Earlier versions of Dreamweaver locate the personal configuration folder in a slightly different location. This is where it can be found in Dreamweaver CS3:
- Vista: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration
- Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration
- Mac OS X: Macintosh HD:Users:<username>:Library:Application Support:Adobe:Dreamweaver 9:Configuration
The Dreamweaver configuration folders are hidden on Windows, so you need to enable the option to view hidden files and folders in order to locate them, as follows:
- In Vista, select Start > Computer > Organize > Folder and Search Options > View. In Advanced settings, choose Show hidden files and folders.
- In Windows XP, select Start > My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > View. In Advanced settings, choose Show hidden files and folders.
Once you turn on this option, hidden folders are displayed as dimmed icons to remind you to treat them with care.
February 11th, 2009
Bad news, as they say, always comes in threes. First, I had to attend a family funeral on the other side of the world; then I fell ill, and finally, the motherboard on my dedicated server went into meltdown. As a result, all my websites have been offline since at least Wednesday of last week (14 January 2009), and I have been unable to answer a lot of questions in online forums, including my own blog.
The good news is that my server is now back online, and I hope to deal with the backlog of questions in the next few days. Apologies if you have been waiting for an answer.
January 20th, 2009
I seem to be jinxed with the way phpMyAdmin “celebrates” the publication of one of my books by changing its setup process. It happened twice with Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8. I updated the instructions between the first and second printings, but was caught out by a second change. Now it’s happened with The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP. The book was published on 1 December, and on the very same day phpMyAdmin 3.1.0 was released, changing the setup procedure yet again.
I’ll create a full tutorial on the revised procedure when I get time, but you can find a summary of the main differences on the updates page for The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4.
December 7th, 2008
PHP 5.2.7, which was released last Thursday (4 December), has a bug that prevents “magic quotes” from working. If you rely on magic quotes, do not install PHP 5.2.7. Either revert to PHP 5.2.6 or wait until a fix is released. The bug has been fixed in PHP 5.2.8. the “snapshot” version of PHP, which can be obtained at http://snaps.php.net/
If you turn magic quotes off in PHP—which you should—you won’t be affected by this bug. It serves as a reminder that magic quotes are due to be removed in PHP 6. Magic quotes were originally introduced to make life “easier” for inexperienced developers by automatically inserting a backslash in front of single and double quotes in user input to prevent problems with database insertion. However, they have proved more trouble than they’re worth. Instead of magic quotes, you should use dedicated functions, such as mysql_real_escape_string(), or prepared statements with MySQLi or PDO to handle quotes and other special characters and protect your database from SQL injection attacks.
December 7th, 2008
Defining a local testing server in Dreamweaver isn’t difficult, but a surprising number of people get it wrong. So, I have created a couple of video tutorials that describe the options and then take you through the actual process in the Site Definition dialog box. Because the options are different for Windows and Mac OS X, I have created separate tutorials. Both are approximately eight minutes long.
The tutorials are hosted on an Adobe site, and the videos start automatically after opening in a new window. A control panel lets you skip to different sections of the tutorial, and most of the text can be read by opening the Notes tab. The videos are resizable, but are best viewed in a 1024 x 768 browser window. The Windows tutorial is here, and the Mac one is here.
November 21st, 2008
Previous Posts