I (i.e., the blog) have been a bit quieter lately than I would prefer. I strive to post three times per week, but some weeks are more forgiving than others! So here’s a quick update on what’s going on in my world…
I’m still catching up from my [intlink id=”3212″ type=”post”]trip to Istanbul[/intlink] and the [intlink id=”3215″ type=”post”]e-commerce presentation[/intlink] I gave there. I still plan on posting about the actual presentation itself, as well as a review of Scott Berkun’s book, “Confessions of a Public Speaker,” which was quite helpful.
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I’m just about finished with a small e-commerce project for a client, which should have been done an eon ago. But it will be nice to finally have that crossed off my list.
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Tomorrow I take off to San Francisco for a whirlwind trip (which, hopefully, will go more smoothly than the trip to Istanbul!). On Wednesday and Thursday I’m doing training on JavaScript, jQuery, and jQuery Mobile. The training is part of a large week-long project aimed at educators, primarily college-level faculty and instructors. Most of the JavaScript and jQuery material comes straight from my “Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design” book. The content on mobile Web development and jQuery Mobile is new, and I expect I’ll be writing a bit about this subject in the future, particularly at the end of the summer (when I know I’ll be doing a couple of mobile Web sites).
Since I have to take a redeye flight home from San Francisco, I opted to fly back on Friday night. This gives me time on Friday to: have dinner with a couple of friends, meet with my publisher, and possibly grab another meeting in there if there’s time.
I mention all this because I won’t be very responsive (Twitter, email, blog, forums) for the rest of the week.
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I’m just today finally responding to all the entrants for my most recent book giveaway. Sorry about the delay! I’m a bit traumatized to realize that another[intlink id=”1564″ type=”page”]newsletter[/intlink] is scheduled to go out in the next week. Hopefully I can get that written on the plane.
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And, finally, most of my time has been spent working on the third edition of my “PHP Advanced and Object-Oriented Programming” book. I’m happy to say that 10 out of 15 chapters have been submitted. But I regret to say that I am, as always, behind schedule. I will get those last five chapters done in July and the book will come out late summer, I believe. The good news is that there’s plenty of new content, with an emphasis on OOP. So far I’ve added:
- Discussion of mod_rewrite
- Introduction to the Unified Modeling Language (UML)
- Introduction to phpDocumentor
- Interfaces
- Traits
- Type Hinting
- Namespaces
- Creating a Web service
- Using PHP’s built-in server
- Defining XML schemas
Those are the main new sections. There are also little added bits here and there, including in sidebars and tips. I’m using some new examples in the OOP sections, and adding more OOP design theory discussion.
Most of the remaining chapters are new material, too, which will cover:
- Unit testing
- Debugging with DBG
- Profiling
- Server-side caching
- Design patterns
- Using PDO
- The Standard PHP Library (SPL)
- An Object-Oriented Programming-based example
- Using the Zend Framework
As you can imagine, this will keep me pretty busy in July.
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Once this book is done, I have a couple of small Web projects to do, as well as a lot of maintenance (e.g., I’ve got an update to this site ready for a couple of months now). I also want to keep writing my “What It Means To Be a Writer” series. The bulk of my work for the rest of the year will be on the [intlink id=”3187″ type=”post”]Yii book[/intlink], as well as creating the software to distribute and support it.
Thanks to everyone for their patience and interest in what I have to say and do. If you have any requests, let me know and I’ll add it to the list!
