Peter Blogs » Web design

Zend Framework – A Beginner’s Guide, by Vikram Vaswani

Peter — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 18:44:32 +0000

The Zend framework is currently one of the most used frameworks for application development in PHP. It is well-supported and offers a robust and feature-rich set of tools and a living, competent and skilled community of users.

This book is a beginner’s guide to the Zend framework. It is, however, important to notice what it is not: It most certainly is not a beginner’s guide to PHP. Quite the opposite; if you haven’t mastered PHP at an intermediate level before you start working with this book -– you may soon be lost. So it is beginner’s guide that actually presupposes quite a lot.

Having said that, in my opinion this is a great book for programmers and application developers. It really is a very practical guide to the Zend Framework, and offers tips about how to use the framework smartly, with discussion of options and guides to using this rich framework in ways which are considered best practice. It shows, in real world examples, how extensive, scalable and flexible this framework is. The book discusses Basic Features; Basic Principles and Conventions; Models; Controllers and Views; Authentication, Access Control and Sessions; Routing; Error Handling; Advanced Features; XML; Ajax and JSON; Localization; Web Services; and Performance Optimization.

You will learn how to use the Zend Framework to simplify and shorten the application development cycle, reduce testing time and improve quality. Lots of examples of real-world implementation of code are offered. Also, all the code from the book is available for readers to download. In addition, there are links at the end of each chapter that point to very good and useful references that expand on what the chapter covered. The “ask the expert” boxes provide lots of useful information too.

The writing style is very clear and concise. In my opinion this is one of the best books on the Zend Framework there are, if not the best. It helped me a lot – I found it tough going in the beginning, but as I progressed I found it to be excellent. It is a book I feel I can recommend to anyone wanting to learn about and understand the Zend framework.

Web Design DeMYSTiFieD, by Wendy Willard – review

Peter — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:27:17 +0000

Website design sounds very hard. And of course it is – if you’re talking about designing the front page of New York Times or CNN or some such page. However, to learn the basics and get started with Web Design is something anybody can do – it’s just a matter of learning the basics in a way that is accessible and understandable. And that’s precisely where Web Design DeMYSTiFieD comes in – it is a handy, well laid out book that takes you through all the necessary and basic steps involved in creating a Web site!

The author, Wendy Willard, is an accomplished professional with more than 13 years of experience in all aspects of design, including publication, print, and Web. She is the author of the bestseller, HTML: A Beginner’s Guide, now in its fourth edition, and has written additional books and articles on the topics of Photoshop, Web design, and Mac O/S.

The book is quite up to date, and teaches all the latest website development tools, techniques, and best practices in a step-by-step fashion that seems excellent for beginners in this difficult craft. Web Design Demystified provides lots of hands-on help, which is exactly what you need to get started.

This is an excellent book for learners – it is not designed as an overview guide, doesn’t seek to cover the field from A to Z nor go into great depth and provide all the latest hacks – rather is has a practical purpose: To get you started! Nothing more, nothing less! It is structured to follow a basic web design syllabus for a community college.

To achieve this, it teaches you website planning and designing for screens. Then, it goes on to show you how to build pages, use and integrate HTML and CSS, work with JavaScript, PHP, and XML, and use templates. Also, it shows how to do design HTML e-mail and the basics of search engine optimization. And these are all things you need to learn.

The examples in Web Design DeMYSTiFieD are clear and concise and the explanations are good. In addition, the book has end-of-chapter quizzes and a final exam to help reinforce key concepts.

You’ll learn how to:

Create design mockups that meet the project goals
Add images and multimedia with HTML
Style text, lists, links, and forms with CSS
Integrate HTML and CSS for layout
Improve your site’s search engine ranking
Code HTML for e-mail

To my mind this is a great tool for people wanting to get started on Web Design. I also think it is an excellent book for teaching Web Design in hands-on oriented classes. It is simple enough for a beginner and teaches good habits right off the bat. I am sure you will find Web Design DeMYSTiFieD a good investment if you want to get started right now!

Plug-in PHP – 100 power solutions, by Robin Nixon

Admin — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 04:13:02 +0000

This is a practical, nice guide to the huge and marvelous world of PHP plug-ins and snippets. There is a wide range of solutions to problems you have and will be encountering if you are a programmer, create websites or are a webmaster, and this book introduces you to those solutions. The book has a good introduction that shows you in detail how to set up a PHP+MySQL+Apache server solution, using the best, most current and up to date technology with free programs available. Then, having done that, it gives you 100 power plug-ins that are ready to go and the can easily be included on your web pages.

PHP is a very versatile language, and there are an incredible number of people writing all sorts of programs – small and large – that they share with others. Learning the basics about how to build such useful little pieces of code, how to integrate them into you web site, and last but not least – how to modify them to suit your needs is very useful. It’s the stuff that enables you to create first-rate, efficient and dynamic websites. Few books that I know of do a better job demonstrating these techniques than Plug-in PHP.

Each and every plug-in discussed in Plug-in PHP represents a complete, usable and working solution, and gives you immediate results. And all of the plug-ins presented in the book, along with some other useful snippets of code, are available on a companion website so that you can download, modify, experiment or do whatever you want with them (you are not allowed to sell them, of course). And there’s little or no learning curve, because each one is self-contained and thoroughly documented.

Plug-in PHP also contains a lot of good and useful tips about programming along with ideas and suggestions for further adapting the functions to your own needs. It even breaks down all the variables, arrays and functions used by each into at-a-glance tables, accompanied by a screen grab of every function in action. This makes the book extremely easy to use, even for complete beginners to PHP programming.

Here’s a quick listing of the plug-ins: Wrap Text; Caps Control; Friendly Text; Strip Whitespace; Word Selector; Count Tail; Text Truncate; Spell Check; Remove Accents; Shorten Text; Upload File; Resize Image; Make Thumbnail; Image Alter; Image Crop; Image Enlarge; Image Display; Image Convert; GIF Text; Image Watermark; Relative to Absolute URL; Get Links from URL; Check Links; Directory List; Query Highlight; Rolling Copyright; Embed YouTube Video; Create List; Hit Counter; Referer Log; Evaluate Expression; Validate Credit Card; Create Captcha; Check Captcha; Validate Text; Validate E-mail; Spam Catch; Send E-mail; BB Code; Pound Code; Check Links; Get Title from URL; Auto Back Links; Create Short URL; Use Short URL; Simple Web Proxy; Page Updated?; HTML to RSS; RSS to HTML; HTML to Mobile; Users Online; Post to Guestbook; Get Guestbook; Post to Chat; View Chat; Send Tweet; Send Direct Tweet; Get Tweets; Replace Smileys; Replace SMS Talk; Add User to DB; Get User from DB; Verify User in DB; Sanitize String; Create Session; Open Session; Close Session; Secure Session; Manage Cookie; Block User by Cookie; Create Google Chart; Curl Get Contents; Fetch Wiki Page; Fetch Flickr Stream; Get Yahoo! Answers; Search Yahoo!; Get Yahoo! Stock News; Get Yahoo! News; Search Google Books; Convert Currency; Ajax Request; Post Ajax Request; Get Ajax Request; Protect E-mail; Toggle Text; Status Message; Slide Show; Input Prompt; Words from Root; Predict Word; Get Country by IP; Bypass Captcha; Get Book from ISBN; Get Amazon Sales Rank; Pattern Match Word; Suggest Spelling; Google Translate; Corner GIF; Rounded Table; Display Bing Map.

Many of the plug-ins in the book can also easily be adapted slightly for other purposes, and all of them seem to me to be written in very efficient and compact code. There is an impressive range of stuff here – for processing text; image uploading and manipulation; content management; forms and user input; integrating your website with others; creating chat and messaging services; using MySQL; managing sessions and cookies; dealing with APIs; RSS; and XML; as well as integration with JavaScript and Ajax; and more.

Plug-in PHP is a very useful and well-written book that I do not hesitate to recommend for users that are just now starting to use PHP and even to people with intermediate skills. For very advanced users, on the other hand, there is little new in this book. It’s a great resource that I strongly recommend for its targeted groups of users!

CSS in Easy Steps, by Mike McGrath

Admin — Sun, 30 May 2010 21:09:15 +0000

Cascading Style Sheets is an important language to master for people designers wanting their web pages to look good, load fast and be easy to maintain. In this book author Mike McGrath explains CSS and gives a good overview of how to use it.

CSS in Easy Steps is short and sweet. I was surprised by the amount of material McGrath has been able to get into the less than 200 pages of this book. It contains a fairly comprehensive overview of CSS with fairly wide coverage and with a very good presentation of the principal features of CSS. It even has a relatively good presentation of some of the new features of CSS3.

However, there are some minor flaws in the book. For instance, McGrath gives readers a basic CSS page layout using absolute positioned sidebars without explaining the limitations of this design at all. Designs with absolutely positioned sidebars are hardly ever used, and should not be used by people why do not know the problems of these designs (e.g. overwriting the footer is there is more content in the sidebars than in the main content column). Also, a few references or links to further explanations or more advanced examples or problems involved in using CSS would have improved the book.

Even so, this is a good and useful book. To my mind this book, written in an easy to follow style, with good explanations in plain English, is a very useful book for beginners. For more advanced users there is little new in this book, and it is far too brief to serve as a reference book.

The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, by Rachel Andrew

Admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 03:43:11 +0000

The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 3rd Edition, which is the full title of the current version of the book, is a good book on CSS. However, I bought it after having seen the ad for it on sitepoint’s site. I have to say I expected it to be a little more advanced than it turned out to be, and a little bit more a jour as well. The good folks at sitepoint are sometimes a little too good and to clever in their marketing, and create impressions that don’t usually meet the expectations. Almost to the point where I now finally have learned to divide what they write by pi and will most likely keep a larger distance to their products. Sitepoint should perhaps ask what they want as a publisher: Satisfied customers that re-purchase or sales that give customer dissatisfaction.

Oh well, on to the book itself. The book is quite good and covers CSS broadly without giving much in-depth coverage and very few references. Rachel Andrew provides a large number of good, standards compliant examples of how to use CSS in a set of different situations. It is a book that I would think of as very useful for people with beginning to intermediate CSS-skills.

The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks is a practical introduction and guide. The author shows how to use CSS for all the common purposes: for styling text, formatting headings and images, for styling forms and for user interfaces and navigation.

The book has a preface, nine chapters, and an index. Chapter 1 is an introduction to CSS showing why it is replacing HTML table and layout formatting, and the basic concepts of CSS. The other chapters have a “problem/solution” format dealing with various design issues, and solutions to those issues using CSS. There is also quite a bit of material about browser-compatibility issues, but some of this is quickly getting old as new version have been launched and/or are in the process of being launched.

The book is mostly useful as a practical guide. It is not very good as a reference book. Nor is it very up to date as far as the emerging CSS3 standards are concerned. This disappointed me a little, as most people creating web pages today or in the near future will want to use these new techniques instead of the older and often more complicated ones.

I recommend The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks primarily for people wanting to learn CSS that prefers to do it by solving practical problems one by one as they encounter them.

CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, Second Edition, by Andy Budd, Simon Collison and Cameron Moll

Admin — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:52:49 +0000

Andy Budd, the first author of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, is renowned in the web development community as one of the foremost proponents of web standard in Great Britain. The first edition of this book was very good, but is already outdated, so this major revision was timely.

This is a 300 page book, very hands on, which demonstrate what CSS can achieve. It is a hands-on learning tool rather than a reference text. It has lots of code examples, is good when it comes to discussing cross-browser support, has some discussion of CSS3, as well as CSS3 examples, showing new CSS3 features, and CSS3 equivalents to tried and tested CSS2 techniques.

The book starts off with a discussion of CSS and its basics. Then we immediately delve deeper into the use of it – visual formatting with CSS, positioning, design effects, and so on. The focus is more on design issues than with the coding itself. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on efficient layouts.

The book is good at conveying best practice concepts in CSS design, as well as solutions to some tricky problems in CSS (two chapters are devoted to this). The section on dealing with browser bugs is very good.

This is not a book for beginners. It is more advanced and more design oriented. There are lots of discussions of fairly advanced techniques, which makes the book useful for more experienced designers. I would say it is an intermediate level book.

One problem with this book needs to be mentioned: It has a lot of typos and errors. The list of errors (available online) is now more than 11 pages long. If you can live with that – personally I don’t much like books with typos and errors – then this is a good book to learn from.

Cascading Style Sheets – The Definitive Guide, by Eric A. Meyer

Admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:35:18 +0000

Eric A. Meyer is a well-known and much respected expert on the subject of CSS. In this book he uses his trademark wit and humor to explore all the properties of CSS. The book covers CSS2 and CSS2.1, as well as basic CSS. It also introduces some of the emerging elements of CSS3.

I really enjoyed this book. It is very solid and an excellent reference for anything CSS. But it is presented in a precise and concise manner with a huge smile. Eric Meyer seems to have enjoyed writing the book. And that actually makes the book more intesting. The examples – of which there are many – are sometimes funny, and his comments interesting.

Don’t get me wrong – this is a great reference book. And all reference books are to some extent boring – because they cover so much, and always deal with a lot you already know. And this book does all that. But Meyer shows that it is possible to liven up even boring books a little here and there.

CSS: The Definitive Guide details the ins and outs of the CSS specification. It has numerous easy to follow examples. The illustrations are invaluable as they allow you to easily compare the markup, the applied style sheets, and the results. It is very comprehensive and virtually leaves no stone unturned.

If you want to learn more about the newer versions of CSS or you want to have a few really good in-depth reference books on CSS around, then this is a book I strongly recommend. One of the top books on CSS. Really a Definite Guide!

Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS (2nd Edition), by Dan Cederholm

Admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:16:55 +0000

Dan Cederholm is one of the smartest minds in CSS and HTML. He is internationally known as a deep and innovative coder. He has been working on real-world sites for no-nonsense businesses like Google, ESPN, and Fast Company, Inc. He embraces flexible, adaptable design using Web standards through his design work, writing, and speaking. Dan is the author of two best-selling books: Bulletproof Web Design and Web Standards Solutions. Dan also runs the popular weblog SimpleBits, where he writes articles and commentary on the Web, technology, and life. He also plays a mean ukulele and occasionally wears a baseball cap.

In this book Cederholm examines a number of the real world challenges that Web designs are exposed to, and seeks to show how designs can be coded using CSS so that they become “bulletproof”.

And Bulletproof Web Design does an incredible job of teaching that – step-by-step, by showing you how to make your website `Bulletproof.’ Cederholm introduces the book by defining what it means to have a bulletproof website. He uses the example of a police officer wearing a bulletproof vest. No, it is not 100% protection against a bullet – but it decreases the chances and gives extra protection. When applied to a website, this means that your website can handle the `bullets’ being thrown at it. These are things like text resizing, use of assistive devices, no CSS, no images, and a few other examples.

This is a wonderful book, where Cederholm deals with coding and design problems all the way from multi-column layouts that stay crispy in milk, to maintaining fine control of web fonts and sizes without alienating users. I have just finished reading it, and I liked it a lot. It is very useful and practically oriented. Just about every problem a modern web designer faces is examined, with solutions ranging from good to better to best.

Cederholm’s point is that no matter how visually appealing or content-packed a Web site may be; if it’s not adaptable to a variety of situations and reaching the widest possible audience, it isn’t really succeeding. So he outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control – key components of every successful site. Each chapter starts out with an example of a good looking, great site – that employs a traditional HTML-based approach and is not bulletproof. Then Dan then deconstructs it, pointing out its limitations. He then gives the site a make-over using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you can see how to replace bloated code with lean markup and CSS for fast-loading sites that are accessible to all users.

Finally, in the last part of the book, he covers several popular fluid and elastic-width layout techniques and pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single-page template.

Bulletproof Web Design is a nice, useful reference as well as a great source for inspiration.

The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice), by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, Jessie Stricchiola

Admin — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 02:51:08 +0000

This is a newly published book about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which brings you state-of-the-art knowledge and best practice on implementing and putting that knowledge into use and make you site visible to the search engines. In order to succeed in the web economy, optimizing your site for search engine visibility and visits from people searching for what you can offer is essential.

The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice) is written by four of the most noted experts in the field of search engine optimization (SEO). Here they provide you with proven guidelines and cutting-edge techniques for planning and executing a comprehensive SEO strategy.

There are many misconceptions and misunderstanding about SEO, and the authors know and tell a lot about those too, along with the fundamentals of good SEO. The book actually more or less gives you an education in SEO. It also addresses effectively working SEO tactics and provides you with a complete reference to SEO best practices. Some topics addressed in The Art of SEO are:

Explore the underlying theory behind SEO and how search engines work
Learn the steps you need to prepare for, execute, and evaluate SEO initiatives
Examine a number of advanced strategies and tactics
Understand the intricacies involved in managing complex SEO projects
Learn what’s necessary to build a competent SEO team with defined roles
Glimpse the future of search and what lies ahead for the SEO industry

Here is the chapter by chapter content of the book:

Ch 1: The Search Engines: Reflecting Consciousness and Connecting Commerce

Ch 2: Search Engine Basics

Ch 3: Determining Your SEO Objectives and Defining Your Site’s Audience

Ch 4: First Stages of SEO

Ch 5: Keyword Research

Ch 6: Developing an SEO-Friendly Website

Ch 7: Creating Link-Worthy Content and Link Marketing

Ch 8: Optimizing for Vertical Search

Ch 9: Tracking Results and Measuring Success

Ch 10: Domain Changes, Post-SEO Redesigns, and Troubleshooting

Ch 11: Honing the Craft: SEO Research and Study

Ch 12: Build an In-House SEO Team, Outsource It, or Both?

Ch 13: An Evolving Art Form: The Future of SEO

If you want to learn more about SEO, this is one of the best books for it. No major topic has been left out. SEO has so many components, and this book helps you see how they come together in bringing traffic to your site. A great investment!

Links to The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice) at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

Landing Page Optimization, by Tim Ash

Admin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 01:10:44 +0000

Landing pages are pages designed specifically to make people land on your site – mostly from search results pages. But getting them there – creating a page with good SEO
that makes your page and your site visible to the search engines is only half the job. Once they arrive, the page must also be good enough and interesting enough to make them want to stay a little, and perhaps even visit other pages on your site.

Tim Ash’s book teaches you some basic skills to achieve this. As a matter of fact, it is one of the better guides around that gives a step-by-step, comprehensive guide that imparets to you the skills necessary to improve your bottom line. And, for most of us, that’s something that matters a little, isn’t it?

So this neat guide teaches you to identify mission critical parts of your website and their true economic value, to define visitor classes and key conversion tasks, how to gain an understanding on customer decision-making, and other related tasks. It tells you about some common pitfalls – ones that I certainly have been unaware of – and how to awoid them. The book also includes a companion website and a detailed review of the Google Website Optimizer tool.

That’s a lot of crucially important information in a little package for people concerned about making visitors come, turnings visitors into customers, and improving the bottom line!

Links to Tim Ash’s book on Landing Page Optimization at amazon US and amazon UK.