Posts filed under 'Books'
For the past couple of weeks, online stores in the United States have been out of stock of The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP. I’ve been in touch with my publisher to find out what the problem is. Apparently, the book has proved far more popular than expected. The book is being printed for the fifth time in less than a year, and supplies should soon be back to normal. It’s also available as an eBook by going to the book’s page on the friends of ED site and clicking the “buy as eBook” link.
June 2nd, 2008
I’ve had my head down for the past few months pounding away at my next book, PHP Object-Oriented Solutions. I put the finishing touches to the final chapter a couple of days ago, and it’s now in the hands of the friends of ED technical review and editorial process. There’s a preview of what the book contains on the foED site, and I plan to get more details up on my own site in the not too distant future.
The book is due to be published in August. The date was chosen because that’s when all support for PHP 4 officially comes to an end. The painfully slow migration to PHP 5 by hosting companies has severely hindered the adoption of object-oriented programming (OOP) among PHP developers, but I hope this book will convince readers that OOP makes for cleaner scripts that are easier to maintain. PHP Object-Oriented Solutions is aimed at readers who feel at home with basic PHP, but want to take their skills to the next level. It’s a gentle, but fast-paced introduction to the delights and mysteries of OOP.
May 3rd, 2008
The instructions in The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 and Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8 were written before the release of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Revised instructions for setting up virtual hosts on Leopard can now be found in the Tutorials section of my website.
May 3rd, 2008
The URL for the Adobe online seminar about Dreamweaver CS3 that I gave in late March is rather hard to find. So, here’s a direct link. When you get to the Adobe site, you’ll be asked to login with your Adobe ID, and answer a couple of simple questions. The recording is one hour long.
Towards the end of the recording, I give out a promotional code for a 25% discount on the eBook version of The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP. The eBook is available by going to this page on the friends of ED site, and clicking the “Buy as eBook” link. Want a hint as to what the promotional code is? Well, it’s three letters followed by two numbers. The fact that the seminar was part of Adobe Developer Week 2008 should give you a “strong” clue. The code is valid until the end of April 2008.
April 18th, 2008
All this week, Adobe is running Adobe Developer Week, a series of seminars on web development. On Friday 28 March, it’s my turn to give a talk called “The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP”. If that sounds an incredibly ambitious subject for a one-hour talk, it is, but what the heck. Actually, Adobe simply decided to use the title of my book; but there’s no way I can cram the content of all 750 pages into my talk, so what I plan to do is give a little flavour of each aspect: CSS, Adobe’s version of Ajax (Spry), and PHP. I’ll be demonstrating live with Dreamweaver, showing tips and best practice techniques.
So, why not join me online at 1600 UTC (0900 PST) on Friday? To participate, you need to register on the Adobe website. Up to 2,500 can join the live presentation, and it will be available as a recording about a week later. One lucky person joining the live seminar will be chosen at random to receive a free copy of Dreamweaver CS3, Flash CS3, or Flex Builder 3. (Unfortunately, for legal reasons, the draw applies only to the US and Canada.)
March 26th, 2008
Several readers have asked me to explain how to create a link to a specific panel in a Spry tabbed panels widget or accordion. The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 shows how to do this from the same page, but not from another page. It’s quite simple to do with the help of SpryURLUtils.js, which was added to the Spry framework in version 1.6. I’ve added step-by-step instructions in the Tutorials section of my site, complete with a zip file containing a simple example. I hope you find it useful.
February 9th, 2008
A week ago, I wrote about the blip in supplies of The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP. My publisher (friends of ED) got onto the case immediately, and told me that 388 copies of the book were on the way to Amazon.com. You might think that would be enough to keep Amazon going for a while. Indeed it did—about one day. Now, although I’d love to sell that number of books in a day—and every day—for a sustained period, books about Dreamweaver and PHP don’t fall into the same category as Harry Potter. The reason the mountain of books disappeared so quickly is because of back orders waiting to be fulfilled.
I’ve just checked Amazon again—and on Monday morning (London time, 28 January), the book was back in stock, but there was only one copy left. Wow, this book is hot! Grab it while you can. Nothing pleases me more than to see my book fly off the shelves, but it’s equally frustrating to see readers unable to get hold of a copy because demand was higher than anticipated. I see that Amazon is now quoting 4 February as the date supplies should be back to normal. Let’s hope it’s no later than that, and preferably sooner.
January 28th, 2008
For the past couple of weeks, the availability of The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP has been listed on Amazon.com as “usually ships within 1 to 3 weeks”. Very often, particularly with a recently published book, that means demand has been higher than expected, and there’s a temporary blip in supply. However, today the availability suddenly changed to “usually ships within 3 to 6 weeks”, so I decided to get in touch with my publisher to find out what’s going on.
Apparently, demand for the book has risen in recent weeks, so that’s good news for me. Thank you to everyone who has bought a copy. It has also been reprinted, and I’m told the new copies should already be in the distribution chain. Apologies if you have ordered a copy, and still haven’t got it. We’re trying to find out if we can speed up deliveries. [Update:] It looks as though things are moving. Amazon seems to have got hold of a few copies, and it’s quoting January 30 as the day when supplies should be back to normal. If you can’t wait, The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 is available for immediate download as an eBook. You can buy it through visiting the book’s page on the friends of ED website. By the way, this distribution problem does not affect Amazon in the UK, where the book is reported to be in stock.
January 22nd, 2008
One of the features I stressed in PHP Solutions was the need to write secure code. On page 378, I said it was essential to display error messages in a development environment so that you can debug your code. However, raw error messages look unprofessional in a live website. Well, guess who forgot to take his own advice? Yes, it was me—guilty as charged. Do as I say, not do as I do.
I found out as a result of a couple of messages posted under a pseudonym to my blog. Since I have been involved in an acrimonious discussion about security in the past couple of days, I suspect that someone involved in that discussion, either as a participant or an observer, wanted to embarrass me. The way in one of the messages was phrased appeared to be a direct reference to something I had written in the other discussion. Sure, I’ve ended up with (a little) egg on my face, but the error message didn’t reveal anything about the structure of the site; and I have now implemented the advice on page 378.
Am I embarrassed about the event? Yes, I suppose I am, but we all make mistakes from time to time. If I have made a mistake, I’m usually the first to admit it, particularly if the person pointing it out does so in a spirit of mutual help. I decided not to publish the messages—not to save my red face, but because the poster didn’t have the decency to use his (or her) own name, and because it was done in an offensive way. The poster accused me of wasting my time in a forum that I haven’t visited probably for about two years, although it’s a forum that provides a lot of free and usually very sound advice about website design.
Security on the web, as well as in everyday life, is important to all of us. Pointing out another person’s mistakes can be a valuable service. It’s not a question of scoring points, but of helping one another. Throughout the other discussion, I used my own name, as did most other participants. We had a genuine disagreement, but everyone was open about it. Sadly, the person who found a minor security error in one of my pages decided to be abusive and hide behind a false name. So, whoever you are, thank you for bringing it to my attention, but your actual posts have been sent to cyberoblivion.
January 22nd, 2008
A question in the friends of ED forum from a reader of The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP has alerted me to a change in the way Spry 1.6 handles HTML tags in CDATA sections of an XML file. This results in most of the examples in Chapters 19 & 20 breaking after you upgrade to Spry 1.6. Fortunately, the remedy is simple. You can find the details on the book’s updates page.
January 6th, 2008
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