Professional PHP » books

php | tek Wrapup

Jeff — Tue, 27 May 2008 05:57:30 +0000

I really enjoyed myself at this year’s php | tek. The conference seemed even better than last year. Here are the slides from my talks…

Here are some of the books I mentioned…

I’m already looking forward to next year.

Managing Open Source Projects

Jeff — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:50:32 +0000

I ran across How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (video) and Producing Open Source Software (book). Anyone know of any other interesting open source project management resources?

Looking forward to 2007

Jeff — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 03:49:50 +0000

Well, I’m finally back in town after the holidays. Let me tell you, I’m glad to be home. Between multiple holidays and taking my grandma to her cancer treatments in Ann Arbor, I was gone far too much of last month.

My Grandma is doing well. They used an experimental new procedure called radio frequency ablation to remove the meta-static colon cancer tumors from her lungs. This procedure is amazing compared to the standard treatment. The doctors at the University of Michigan were impressive. We’ll know the results in a couple months when her lungs look a little less like scrambled eggs. We’re hopeful.

I’m not much for retrospectives. Looking forward into 2007, I have a few major goals. I joined a gym today. I’m going to get a new laptop and refresh my development environment next week after MacWorld. I want to get at least a beta release of WACT out by May. I have to prepare for php|tek. I need to find a new place to live by this fall. (Ann Arbor?) I want to move by the end of the year.

I loved all my christmas and birthday gifts this year. (My birthday is December 28th.) This year I pointed everyone to my Amazon.com wishlist and I ended up with a ton of good books to read. Jason Gillmore from Apress also sent me some web development books. My to-read stack for 2007 includes:

The Promise of Sleep – A survey of the subject of sleep for laymen, written by a top sleep researcher. I’m almost done with this one. This book has a bunch of sleep deprivation horror stories and a good survey of what is known about sleep, which is not much. Its incredible that we know so little about something we spend so much time doing. Its also amazing how many people have easily treatable sleep disorders that don’t even know it. Do you snore?
Don’t make me Think – Looks like a nice overview book on web usability.
Domain Driven Design – Recommended by Jason and Marcus. How did I get this far without reading this book?
Da Vinci Code – Wasn’t on my wishlist, but I’ll read it anyway. I read so little fiction these days. Where is a beach when you need one?
Getting Things Done – I’m almost through this one. It is a testimony to the power of the ideas that this book expresses that so many people recommend it, despite its being so incredibly dull. Useful? Yes. Inspiring? No. But, then I’ve read enough of these self help / personal productivity type books for a lifetime. Anyone want to buy a Franklin Planner? I used mine until I got a cell phone.
Practical Subversion – I’m really liking subversion. If you haven’t tried it, do so. I’m hoping to combine this with Greg Beaver’s book, The PEAR installer manifesto — the book on my wishlist I most wanted that I didn’t get, to create a new deployment process.
Pro CSS Techniques – A CSS book that tackles maintainability? I’m really looking forward to this one.
Pro MySQL – The last MySQL book I read was a couple years ago, yet I use it almost every day. I’m due for a refresh. This one looks good.
Pro PHP Security – Never hurts to brush up. This one looks like it has alot on encryption, SSL and SSH; not strong areas for me.
Pattern-Oriented Software ARchitecture Volume 2 – The first volume, A system of patterns, is one of my “always within reach when developing” books. Nice to add to the set.

Thanks for the books, guys. I’ll have in-depth reviews of some of these here in the future.

Happy New Year.

The Paradox of Choice

Jeff — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 05:23:10 +0000

I don’t like to just link to stuff, but outsourcing choice at 37 signals is worth linking to. The post talks about designing interfaces with fewer choices. Really, the interesting thing here is Barry Schwartz and his book, The paradox of Choice. The paradox of choice being that having more choices makes you unhappy. Well, there is more to it than that. The New Yorker has a good summary of the book.

I watched a bunch of google tech talk presentations a few months ago. By far the best presentation was Barry Schwartz explaining The paradox of Choice. This video is worth watching.

I think these are important ideas in the quest for extreme simplicity.

The Evolution of Design Patterns

Jeff — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 18:59:22 +0000

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock suggests that it may be time for the GoF Design Patterns book to be refreshed. She points out that the C++ and graphics programming examples may be less relevant to today’s C# and Java programmers. She implies that state of the art has advanced in the twelve years since the book was written. She also suggests that the GoF authors may have made some of the wrong tradeoffs when they specified some of the patterns.

I know I would like to see an update to this groundbreaking work with more modern interpretations of what have become the canonical patterns.

Rebecca talks about how the interface type has come to replace the C++ abstract class. One area that I am interested in is how Duck typing may replace the interface construct in many of the classic patterns. I’m not sure that patterns intended for statically typed languages such as C++ and java necessarily have the same implementation in dynamically typed languages, such as smalltalk, Ruby and of course, PHP.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been doing an interesting educational exercise. I’ve been simultaneously reading Design Patterns, Refactoring, Refactoring to Patterns, and Agile Software Development. I’m finding the cross-referencing between each of these highly complementary books to be be educational. I’m hoping to add Design Patterns Smalltalk Companion and PHP|Architect’s Guide to PHP Design Patterns (Jason Sweat’s book) to get a more dynamic perspective in the mix. This is my reading project for the next few months.

That 10 years after first reading the Design Patterns book, i am still studying from it shows how much of a classic this book has become.

PHP Book sales trends versus Java and Ruby

Jeff — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 19:06:16 +0000

O’Reilly radar has an interesting graph of 2004 versus 2005 book sales for a variety of languages. The big news is that Ruby books sales are up 1552% and Java book sales are down 4%. This would be consistent with my observations from Why isnâ€™t PHP the natural successor to Java. A small cadre of agile minded developers are giving Ruby a spin.

Meanwhile, there is no change in PHP book sales. Perhaps this suggests that Java is loosing to Ruby, but PHP is not? Or PHP is gaining from Perl, the other language with declining sales, just as fast as its loosing to Ruby? Perhaps you can’t read anything much at all into these numbers.

Also mentioned is that Java books outsell PHP books by 2.5x and PHP books outsell Ruby books by 3x.