Books
I’ve been reading a number of books in order to bring myself up to speed on current web technologies. Here are some of the ones I’m most enjoying:
Web Design in a Nutshell (third edition) by Jennifer Robbins
Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm
Pro MySQL by Kruckenbert and Pipes
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide (fifth edition) by David Flanagan
I’ve also bought the following, but haven’t read them enough to evaluate them yet:
DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith
PHP Hacks by Jack Herrington
Google Maps Hacks by Gibson and Erle
Web Mapping Illustrated by Tyler Mitchell
Mapping Hacks by Erle, Gibson & Walsh
Upgrading to PHP5 by Adam Trachtenberg
Programming PHP by Lerdorf, Tatroe & MacIntyre (so far not too impressed)
Beginning PHP and MySQL 5 by Jason Gilmore
I’ve used a lot of programming languages in my time (even invented a couple of them) but it is very interesting trying to learn two similar languages (PHP and JavaScript) at the same time. Oy! I wish someone would create a decent set of server-side libraries for JavaScript, so you could write both the server-side and client-side code in the same language.
The other day I wrote some Javascript and it wouldn’t work. I looked at it and looked at it, and couldn’t see anything wrong with it. I checked all the library functions to make sure I was calling them correctly. Suddenly, I realized that I was trying to use a PHP library function in a JavaScript program. I was calling it with the correct arguments, I was just in the wrong language. Doh!
–wm