Packt Publishing’s WordPress 2.7 Cookbook has been out for while now, but I still thought I’d pick up a copy and give it the once-over. Rather than being a reference guide, Jean-Baptiste Jung’s book is very much like his very own WpRecipes.com website.
If you haven’t read my review of Digging into WordPress, you may not know that I think it’s currently the best WordPress book available.
One thing I didn’t mention in the review is that when you buy it, you’re entitled to free PDF updates for life. Perhaps I left out this because I thought it would amount to the odd grammar correction and so on. Worthwhile, but not that exciting. How wrong I was, because as co-author Chris Coyier announces on the Digging into WordPress site, version 2.0 has been released and it promises an extra chapter dedicated to WordPress 2.9, as well as one called ‘Bonus Tricks’, which focuses on ’some cool new tricks for your themes’. I’ve only skimmed through the new pages, but the high quality writing and content is preserved.
If you haven’t already grabbed yourself a copy, you should do yourself a favour and buy it!
Unless they’ve been living in a cave for the last couple of years, web developers will be familiar with jQuery. Due to its speed, power and ubiquity, it’s become the de facto JavaScript library for anybody wishing to create cross-browser behaviour.
jQuery version 1.4 was released on January 14, 2009, and hot on the heels of that release is the accompanying ‘jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide‘ book from Packt. The book is nudging at 300 pages in length, and covers the API in a similar way to the excellent online documentation. This isn’t the book for readers with no JavaScript experience, but should be easy to pick up with somebody with at least a limited knowledge.
I seem to be reading quite a few WordPress books of late, and there are certainly a few to choose from. Packt Publishing’s WordPress 2.8 Theme Design’s tagline is ‘Create flexible, powerful, and professional themes for your WordPress blogs and websites’.
WordPress themes are of interest to me since they fuse a visual aspect with PHP code, and there’s no doubt that they appeal to many other people too. In this review, I examine how appealing the book is to theme beginners and more advanced users.
There are a huge number of books out there for WordPress, but ‘Digging into WordPress’, written by WordPress ‘veterans’ Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr stands out for a number of reasons.
The book’s been in development for a while, and the finished 400 pages are very polished and generally well written. The book is available from the Digging into WordPress website, and the site features a PDF Sample and containing the contents and Chapter 3 – ‘Anatomy of a WordPress Theme’.
With all the furore surrounding Ruby on Rails, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that any other web application framework ever existed. The fact is, of course, that there are many to choose from, and one leading PHP-based framework is MVC-based CodeIgniter.
The CodeIgniter website is a great place to start for newcomers and more experienced developers alike, but I still like a good book, that I can hold in my hand and digest. Wrox’s Professional CodeIgniter is such a book, and presents a good overview of the framework that’s getting deserved attention in the web development community.
Respected Freelance website FreelanceSwitch founders Cyan and Collis Ta’eed have written a book about Freelancing and made it available through self-publishing site Lulu.
I picked up a paperback version and here I present my thoughts.
I’ve been mainly a C#/ASP.NET developer over the last few years, but a recent interest in Ruby on Rails (RoR) has lead me to buy a few books to help me learn the framework.
Here I present a list of books, in a particular order, that I recommend to anybody learning RoR.