Effortless Flex 4 Development Book Outline
I’m currently working on my next book, Effortless Flex 4 Development. This is an entirely new title for me and my first full-length book on Flex. It’ll be published by New Riders, which is a sister publisher to Peachpit Press, that I normally work with. Most of the books I’ve written have been in the Visual QuickStart/QuickPro Guide series, which has a scripted format. This book will not be, so you won’t see the step-by-step instructions everywhere (there will be some) or the two-column format. I just submitted the third chapter, so I’ve now written about 90 pages or so, approximately one-quarter of the book. Here’s the rough table of contents, for those that are interested. (continue reading…)
Yii Framework 1.1 Updates
Version 1.1 of the Yii framework was released just recently. I’m going back through the series I wrote on learning Yii and updating it for the latest version. Here’s what I found so far… (continue reading…)
Eight PHP Power Tools
Yesterday, InfoWorld posted an in-depth review of eight PHP-capable IDE’s. Eclipse with PDT, Netbeans, Zend Studio, NuSphere PhpED, and ActiveState Komodo all get “very good” marks. Of these, Eclipse and Netbeans are free, which is always a bonus. If you’re looking for a new IDE for your PHP development, do read this article.
Personally, I use a text editor for my PHP development (TextMate for Mac OS X). But I have used Eclipse quite a bit, just not for PHP. Eclipse is a standard foundation for lots of IDEs, like Flex Builder/Flash Builder and Aptana Studio. I’ve used Netbeans for Ruby development. Both Netbeans and Eclipse are quite good and extremely extendable, but not as user-friendly as some commercial products, in my opinion. I never really took to Zend Studio, for no particular reason. Maybe the price! I did use NuSphere PhpEd for a while (I did some consulting work for that company) and it seemed to be a very likable solution, but it only runs on Windows, which rules it out for me.
