Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

As I already mentioned earlier, I recently bought a brand new Nikon D80 and started with a new hobby: Photography. :) With this entry I'd like to share some first experiences in this direction. The D80 seems to be a very good camera, I'm really amazed about its poissibillities. It is the best non-professional Nikon camera, AFAIK, and might be even a bit oversized for a photo beginner like me. Until now I only had experiences with compact cams and the D80 is my first DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera. However, I'm very interessted in photography so I'm sure I will grow with this camery quite fast. The source of my interest are inspiring photographers in my surrounding: Derick, Sebastian, Marcus and most recently also Kore and Jakob. In addition, I love great photos and always wanted to be able to take those on my own. The final clincher was the experience with Kores D70s in Berlin.

To get started with started with the subject, Jakob recommended a great book to me, which I want to recommend to you now. The book is only available in German, AFAIK, so sorry to you English only readers. "Nikon D80 - Das Buch zu Kamera" does not only give a much more valuable overview on the D80 than the instructions manual does. It also gave me some good hints on what to pay attention for in photography and some technical background. Combined with practical use cases and helpful suggestions for custom settings and equipment, I'm still getting started with a great now hobby. If you like to get more info on this book, please take a look at my recension on Amazon (as soon as it is online).

You can be sure to read some more about my photography progress and to see some more of my pictures here in future. If you want to stay completly tuned, please subscribe to my photo stream on Flickr.

Dynamic-Webpages just elected our eZ Components book to be the book of the month. On the website you now find a picture of the book in a very prominent place and an extensive recension (German) linked from there. Thanks to Wolfgang from Dynamic-Webpages for choosing the eZ Components book and to Sebastian for digging into it and giving a review from a well-known author.

Since about a week, Kores and my first book is being shipped. As you can see below, we already got some examples and hope that everybody who ordered in advance got their examples by now, too. If you don't, stay tuned they should arrive soonish. We are both absolutly amazed by the priniting quality and the overall impression of the bookl. Many many thanks again to Stephan Mattescheck, our lector at Galileo Computing, for his great support and the amazing work of the whole team!

Any feedback about the book is welcome as a comment here, by email or you can seize the chance to meet us from Sunday to Wednesday (2007-11-03 to 2007-11-07) on the International PHP Conference near Frankfurt am Main.

Yesterday I received "PHP Design Patterns", the new book written by Stephan Schmidt, a well-known PHP community member and creator of cool library packages, like most of the PEAR XML section. I seized the time on the tram yesterday night to take a look at it and I have to admit I'm quite impressed. Stephan managed to write down a lot of practical experience in respect to the implementation of OO patterns with PHP.

The book is really well structures and I can only recommend it to everyone who wants to learn more on good OO development with PHP. Stephan first presents the new OO features of PHP 5 (based on 5.1), including overloading and some SPL stuff. The second chapter introduces basic OO design concepts to the reader and makes him familiar with basic UML. After that, Stephan starts the real topic. Chapter 3 deals with generation patters like Singleton and Factory. The following part has structural patterns as the topic and contains patterns like Composite, Decorator and Proxy. For each of these patterns Stephan explains the sense behind it and its purpose. Additionally he gives a practical example of how an implementation could look like, for a specific use case. Chapter 5 deals with behavior patterns, as there are Subject/Observer, Visitor, Iterator and some more, in the same way. The next section is named "Enterprise Patterns" and consists of 2 chapters. The first of those (chapter 6 "Data View and Business Logic") introduces the tier model for application and presents patterns used on the data level, like Active Record and Registry, as well as for implementing business logic (Domain Model). The second part (chapter 7 "Presentation Tier") goes into detail on e.g. Front Controller, Event Dispatcher and Template View.

All in all I really enjoyed digging into the parts I already read and I expect the rest to be as well as those. While some books only touch the theory of design patterns and avoid giving practical examples to the user, Stephan manages very good to combine both.

I want to recommend this book to everyone who is not absolutely familiar with OO development in PHP or who comes from another OO language into PHP development. It can really give you some highly important knowledge on object oriented design patterns and on good OO development in PHP. Beside that, it can give every OO developer from other languages a nice overview and reference on how the well-known patterns are implemented in PHP in contrast to e.g. Java or C#.

Great work, Stephan!

Kore just returned from his Canada vacation and gave me a hand-signed copy of the book he co-authored, "Exploring PHP" - "Von Insidern lernen". Although I did not read it, yet, I'd like to recommend it to you, since I think to know the authors good enough to believe they write good books. The book is (beside others) written by my friends Markus Nix, Sandro Groganz, Kore Nordmann, Stephan Schmidt and Christian Wenz, all of them well-known experts from the PHP community.

In short, "Exploring PHP" is a roundup about advanced PHP programming experiences, covering different topics like:

• Event driven programming in PHP
• Generation of 3D graphics
• Testing with SimpleTest
• Refactoring and Migration
• PHP 6

If you are actively developing with PHP and don't have the time to read cutting-edge news and latest techniques, the book should give you a good roundup on the named topics.

I'm really looking forward to digging into it. Thanks a lot to Kore for the nice example! :)

Zak Greant (collegue here at eZ and well known in the community) just sent me a great collection of book recommendations related to open source, management and marketing, which I'd like to share here:

• The Cluetrain Manifesto (online here)
  • A great set of essays and rants on dealing with highly networked markets
• The Practical Manager's Guide to Open Source
  • A practical introduction to the benefits and background of Open Source
  • Focuses on tangible financial and platform benefits
• Useit.com
  • Jacob Nielsen's columns on Web Usability
  • In particular, his columns on writing for the web:
    • How Users Read on the Web
    • Be Succinct
    • Effective Writing Structure
    • Writing Headlines and other Microcontent
    • Writing for Low-literacy Users
• The Elements of Style (online here)
  • The classic guide to writing concise and effective English.
• Crossing the Chasm
  • An analysis of how to successfully bring technology products to market
• Rules for Revolutionaries
  • A neat guide for innovators. Written by former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki
• The Innovator's Dilemma (excerpt here)
  • An analysis of how to correctly correlate product features to market needs.
• The Tipping Point (A summary of the book can be found here)
  • An analysis of how trends start and spread
• The Customer Evangelism Manifesto (attached)
  • Notes on how to create user evangelists
• It's the Story Stupid (Online here)
  • Doc Searls' guide to giving good presentations

Thanks, Zak! :)

During my vacation I finally found time for some literature and read the book "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl. I first saw that book while grubbing around on Amazon and I got a glimpse of it, when I visited Arnaud in Paris. The latter experience finally convienced my to buy it and I can say: It really was worth it.

Regular expressions (or in short "regex") are a tool (or maybe some kind of language) to describe and match literal text, which is available in nearly every programming language today. I guess everyone in the web application business has used regex from time to time and most developers working on *nix systems will have so during their coding.

The common problem about regex is the documentation. Most languages provide just a rudimentary glimpse on their regex facilities and finding good documentation on what is really possible with an implementation is really hard. Beside that documentation on how to use regular expressions is rare.

This lack is filled greatly by "Mastering Regular Expressions" and I can just strongly recommend the book to every developer out there. Beside a deep look at every available feature of regular expressions Jeffrey provides real-live examples on common problems to solve with regex, gives a great overview on which implementation provides which features (so called regex flavors) and how to emulate features that are not available in an implementation. Further on he gives an introduction into how a regex engine internally works (for both, NFA and DFA driven engines, as well as mixed implementations and Posix NFA) which enables the reader to optimize his expressions in respect to performance and optimal matching.

"Mastering Regular Expressions" consists of 9 large chapters which provide the above described information and much, much more. You can find an overview on the content in the extended entry.

All in all i did not even find 1 sentence useless while reading the book and I will definitly have it available as a reference every time I do something with regex (which will be quite more often in the future). A great due to Jeffrey E. F. Friedl for an absolutly great book!

... is the title of Georg Schlossnagle's new book, which I recieved today from Amazon US. It's the first PHP book I ever bought and will be the first book I ever read about PHP=. :) That's completly against my previous opinion, which was to learn everything by myself from the web and by trying out. But what I recently read in Georgs and Sebastians blogs made me too curious... So, I directly took a first look at the table of contents and it looks marvellous to me. Georgs 650 pages opus is devided into 5 main parts which are named "Implementation and Development Methodologies", "Caching", "Distrubuted Applications", "Performance" and "Extensibility". The concise keyword index lasts from A like ab (ApacheBenchmark), Active Record Pattern and add_assoc_zval() over M like mandatory file locks, Meta Weblog API and Microsoft Passport (single sign on) to XYZ like Xdebug, XML-RPC and Zend Engine. From what I saw until now, it can be a competent guide to up2date technologie for the advanced PHP developer. I will start reading immediatelly this evening... Sounds interessting??