Udi Mosayev

Hi.

“Expert PHP 5 Tools” amazed me. really.
Well written, highly experienced author in the software development field and I found a lot of useful information for me.

The book is for every developer, beginner to expert. I think even the big experts will find so vital information between the lines. You don’t really need to have that much of experience with PHP, and I think if you’re really beginning with the language, this book can boost your programming skills very quickly.

Take a look at the table of contents. For me, as one who works for a while on quite big web app, reading about Deployment, Continuous Integration and even the Debugging chapter helped me a lot to deal with the work I have. I’m really looking forward to integrate all of the solutions into my day job.
If not performing correctly, deployment process might be very risky. In Chapter 8: Deploying Application, you’ll read about the deployment process, learn about common mistakes and basically how to deploy your web application in the best method.

As you may see, you won’t learn too much coding skills, this is not PHP learning book. This book teaches you all those thinks around coding: testing, deployment, documenting and etc. Which are quite interesting, and learning from other people’s experience can save you some time and headache

I’m really happy I have this book in my library, its must-read before I start new project.

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The book “CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development” written by Adam Griffiths. I’ve already wrote a little bit about the book before, and Few days ago I got it in the mail and finished reading it already.

The author is a well known developer in the CodeIgniter community, who also contributed nice authentication library. So as expected, I saw a lot of high quality information in the book, and the experience of the author with CodeIgniter is shown. If I only read the book a year ago, I could’ve become better CodeIgniter developer much faster.

Though the first chapter dedicated to get you started with CodeIgniter, I think its the best if you already have some experience with the framework. And even long-time CodeIgniter developers might find valuable information.

Personally I enjoyed reading about building large scale application [Chapter 7] and the timing is perfect because of the project I’m working on. In my opinion, before reading this book, you must have some experience with CodeIgniter [build 1 applicaiton in CI and you're good to go in my opinion], and this book really can turn you into professional. Use the knowledge you get from this book  and you’ll be much better CodeIgniter developer.

Another chapter I liked is Chapter 10 – Developing and Releasing Code to the Community. Although its quite short chapter, there is a lot of information regarding this subject. The author shared in the chapter his experience writing and maintaining the Authentication library and I really enjoyed it. It motivates you to create and share .

What I was missing in the book, and I think most of the beginners would find it useful is Application Structure examples. Discussing different ways you can build real life web applications that almost every developers writes at some point.

CodeIgniter is amazing PHP framework, its lightweight, very flexible and simple to understand. “CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development” contains very valuable information and practices, that can turn any newbie into skilled CodeIgniter developer. As I already said, if I only had this book a year ago, I could have become better CodeIgniter developer much faster.

For more information about the book & purchase, visit book’s page at PacktPub.com.

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Hi Guys,
Recently I’ve read REWORK – the new book from 37signals, the same guys who wrote Getting Real.

First of all, the book is has great lessons for starting a business as Getting Real has for developing web applications.
Those who follow Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson can see there’s lots of topics in the book you already heard them talking about in their interviews and tech talks, but still there is “fresh” content and great lessons to learn.

I really recommend you to read this book, and Getting Real too of course.

Blog Modifications

I’ve added Disqus to my blog, so you can enjoy this great commenting system here too.
Also you can see I added new design, and I think I’ll stick with it to some time now, I really like it. It clean and clear.

App Development Journey

In few more months I’ll start working on some project I want to start for a while now, while working on it I’ll update frequently about its progress and lessons I learn. Until then I really want to hear what you want to read about, what CodeIgniter or Business Dev question you have.

Have a nice weekend!

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Hi!

I got for my birthday the new book from Wrox – Expert PHP and MySQL by Andrew Curioso, Ronald Bradford and Patrick Galbraith.

“This book examines some of the technologies and techniques needed to make robust and scalable applications perform in today’s high-demand world” (From the Introduction of the book..).

In this book you can learn about:

• Advanced MySQL concepts [Stored Procedures, different drivers and Storage Engines, Views, Triggers, Replications]
• PHP Opcode Cache with APC or eAccelerator
• PHP Caching techniques – Memcached
• Multi Tasking in PHP and MySQL with Gearman
• and more…

This book is for developers who had worked on several projects and have some good experience developing with PHP and MySQL and developers whom develop high-demand applications, or applications that handles lots of data and processing. OOP experience recommended.

What I really enjoyed reading in this book is about

• Gearman – a tool you install in you server and assign jobs [from your client] to those job server. For example – creating thumbnails of the photos your users upload, the thumbnail process done by different server [has Gearman installed and maybe even better for this kind of job] and this allows you to reduce the load on your client server (= faster application).
• Memcached – Memcached is a “High-performance distributed memory objects caching system”, it provides key=>value cache for your applications to reduce the load on your database. Basically, in uses the free memory in your server and uses this to cache objects of your application. its really simple to work with Memcached and it has lots of performance benefits.
• APC/eAccelerator – Each time you run php script the PHP compiler compiles your code again and again. In production environment the code isn’t changing that much, APC and eAccelerator [different tools] allows you to cache the compiled code, this way the server isn’t compiling the same code again and you get better performance. In PHP6 will have APC extension natively.

The techniques discussed in this book used by large sites we all know: Digg, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube and more.. if its good for them I believe its good for you too

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