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!

Links to books by Robin Nixon at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN. See also Bokkilden.

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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.

Links to books by Mike McGrath at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

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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.

Links to books by Rachel Andrew at amazon US and Amazon UK.

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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.

Links to CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd et al. at amazon US and amazon UK.

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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!

Links to books by Eric A. Meyer at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

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PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice, Second Edition is for the intermediate to advanced web developer/programmer interested in learning more about object oriented programming. It is designed to show you how to meld the power of PHP with the sound enterprise development techniques embraced by professional programmers. And while the book spends a little bit of time on the basics of object oriented programming, it quickly moves well beyond that and into advanced topics.

This book deals with issues like working with static methods and properties, abstract classes, interfaces, design patterns, exception handling, and more. You’ll also be exposed to key tools such as PEAR, CVS, Phing, and phpDocumentor and more. The emphasis is on:

• Writing solid, maintainable code by embracing object–oriented techniques and design patterns.
• Creating detailed, versatile documentation using the powerful phpDocumentor automated documentation system.
• Gaining new flexibility during the development process by managing your code within a CVS repository and using the Phing build system.
• Capitalizing upon the quality code of others by using the PEAR package management solution.

I like PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice a lot. It is a great reference on techniques and showed a lot of correct and efficient ways of doing some things I needed to get done. And I would think most PHP programmers and developers that want to embrace sound, scalable development techniques such as object–orientation, design patterns, testing, and documentation will find this book interesting and benefit from it.

Links to PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice at Amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

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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.

Links to books by Dan Cederholm at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

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In many countries around the world, for instance in the Scandinavian countries, one of which I come from, some of the types of marketing used here are actually illegal. Does WordPress want to permit marketing that is illegal in some of the markets they apply to, and which are very borderline even in the US and the UK?

Look for instance at “All in one SEO” and “WP Ajax Edit Comments” plugins. One pushes you to look at their offerings every time you upgrade, the other one forces you to register on their site and promotes a “professional version” there.

In my opinion these and similar plugins should be banned from marketing via the WordPress channels, or at the very least be marked clearly as “for pay” or “commercial products” or something of this kind. I am strongly against marketing where things are presented as free which when they are not!

©2010 Blogging. All Rights Reserved.

This adserver is completely mucking up my internet use. Time after time I see my machine not moving on to the next site I have clicked because it is waiting for “spe.atdmt.com”.

And recently I was completely unable to go back to the previous page while surfing on amazon.com. I read about a particular book and wanted to go back. Several times I was unable to do it, and had to first reload the page I was on and the quickly press back, and then it worked. But then, in the end, even this little trick stopped working, and I had to leave amazon entirely.

So nuke the bastards that slow down my browsing and probabaly that of millions of other people. I hope Amazon, Google and other corporations do something about this – this can’t be in their interest either.

spe.atdmt.com – you suck! Big time!

PS: There are hundreds of people complaining about spe.atdmt.com on the net. robtex.com has a little info about it:

Summary
spe.atdmt.com.edgesuite.net has two IP numbers. They are on the same IP network. spe.atdmt.com cnames to this hostname. This hostname cnames to a1521.x.akamai.net. fr.bebo.com, blogs.abc.es, www.bebo.com, www.esri.com, rmd.atdmt.com and at least 100 other hosts point to the same IP. spe.atdmt.com.edgesuite.net is hosted on two servers in United States.

©2010 Blogging. All Rights Reserved.

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.

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