Archive for April, 2006
My publisher, friends of ED, is running a competition in conjunction with that indispensible blogger’s aid, Blog Design Solutions. Write a suitably witty caption for a photo of a gathering of Brit geeks, and you could end up with “the ultimate web design learning library”. Well, that’s what the guy with the cuddly chicken, Chris Mills, calls it, anyway. Actually, it’s a pretty good collection. I was involved in two of the five books on offer: Blog Design Solutions and Web Designer’s Reference (I was the guy cracking the whip behind Craig Grannell as the book’s technical reviewer/editor).
The three other books on offer are all excellent, too. Andy Budd’s CSS Mastery and Jeremy Keith’s DOM Scripting are selling on Amazon as though there’s no tomorrow-and deservedly so, too. They’re both concise guides to essential standards-compliant web design—even though Andy’s book constantly refers to “standards-complaint browsers” (a good description for all the abuse heaped on IE6). The fifth book is Dan Cederholm’s Web Standards Solutions—the title says it all. If you fancy winning all five books . . .take yourself over to Chris Mills’ blog on the friends of ED site.
Your arduous task, should you wish to accept it, is to come up with something suitably witty to say about a photo of British geekdom at the dinner table. It looks suspiciously like a take-off of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. The only problem is that there are 14 people at table, not 13. And where did that little girl come from? Do geeks start so young these days?
Anyway, if you have some decent tables jokes—or even some indecent ones, why not have a go? Or maybe you have some more original wit? Even better. And if you don’t win, go out and buy the books anyway. We authors need the sales. Otherwise, we may not be able to pay for our next supper.
April 17th, 2006
Goodness knows what must have got into the mind of my editor at friends of ED, Chris Mills, when choosing the cover for Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8. 
It’s dominated by a massive blue fly with huge golden eyes. Must be thankful for small mercies, though. At least the fly isn’t resting on its usual favourite food, and Corné van Dooren’s artwork has done its usual magic of turning the fly into a rather exotic beast. Still, don’t judge a book by its cover alone.
This version of Foundation ActionScript is based on the original material written by Sham Bhangal, but Kristian Besley and I have revised the book from top to bottom. Barely a page has been left untouched, and we’ve added a lot of new material. It now weighs in at 620 pages, in contrast to 460 in the MX 2004 edition. Unfortunately, the previous edition had a huge number of misprints. It was put together in the period when friends of ED was trying to recover from the bankruptcy of its original owners, Peer Information Ltd, and it obviously didn’t go through the same rigorous quality checks that foED books do now. Kris and I have removed all the errors—at least, we hope we have! We’ve also removed aspects of ActionScript, such as prototypes, that we know are being scrapped in ActionScript 3.0.
Obviously, I’m biased about a book that I’ve spent so many months working on, but I think readers will appreciate all the changes that have been incorporated. From my point of view, one of the most important is the decision to switch back to a single column layout. The two-column layout of the previous edition made me go cross-eyed attempting to read some of the code examples. This time, the page is less cluttered, allowing you to concentrate on the content, rather than trying to weave your way through a tangled web of ActionScript.
April 13th, 2006
I just couldn’t resist. When I heard that the new .eu domain names were open to everybody, I just had to have one. So, welcome to davidpowers.eu. I haven’t decided what to do with the new domain just yet, so it’s pointing to foundationphp.com. I chose the foundationphp domain name because it ties in nicely with the titles of my two solo books, Foundation PHP 5 for Flash and Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8. But now that I’ve added Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8 to my repertoire, maybe it’s time to switch to the egocentric domain. Decisions, decisions…
April 12th, 2006