Posts tagged packt publishing
Book Review: Learning Website Development with Django
May 16th
Reviewing The Definitive Guide To Django a few months ago I noted that the key place that book lacked was in examples. As befits the work of the creators of a framework, it did very well at explaining the underlying philosophies and working through all manner of implementation details, but it wasn’t the book for those who just want to dive in and build something. If that’s how you like to use technical books, then Learning Website Development With Django may be more what you’re looking for.
Following the iterative development of a delicious/digg hybrid social bookmarking application, Ayman Hourieh’s book moves quickly through a range of Django features, from setting up your initial models, and using the built in user and admin sections, to supporting AJAX with jQuery, speeding up your app with caching and (briefly) writing automated tests. The pace is fairly measured and Ayman Hourieh does a good job of explaining what’s going on at each step. An experienced web developer should find most of the information they need to get up and running with django, ready to get to work on their own apps.
Perhaps appropriately, where this book is lacking is in explaining how the different parts of the framework fit together. There’s plenty you can pick up by inference, but there are no detailed explanations of, say, the routing system that maps URLs to code. This book’s weaknesses are the former volumes strengths, and while you’ll find much repeated between them a combination of the two is likely to be a good way to get a fully rounded sense of what django is and how you can use it.
Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher. You can find it at packt, amazon US, amazon UK and all sorts of other places.
Book Review: PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects
Oct 28th
The market for books about mashups has become fairly crowded over the past few years but none have really enticed me as from a casual look most seem more interested in following the trend than offering solid information. Thankfully PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects manages to slide in a good number of practical programming tips as it works its way through a variety of services.
The book dedicates the majority of each chapter to more general concerns than just interfacing with the system in the chapter’s title. So Chapter 2—”Buy It On Amazon”—spends most of its time exploring XML-RPC and REST approaches and building tools to work with those different styles of interface. Similarly the next chapter spends most of its time introducing WSDL, XML Schema and SOAP before showing how they can be used with Microsoft Live Search.
In fact, that chapter may be one of the best introductions I’ve seen for developers who need to quickly grasp the basics of WSDL and SOAP, a topic that can far too easily get bogged down in complexity that isn’t needed for basic usage. With the WS-* stack quickly and for good reason going out of fashion hopefully most developers won’t have to spend much time with it, but a simple overview is still very handy.
I was intrigued to see the final chapter diving into use of RDF with the RAP toolkit. Like the SOAP section, this managed to boil the basics of RDF down very well and should help most moderately experienced PHP developers to get up to speed quickly.
Aside from a closing section on race conditions, not much time is given to handling interruptions in service from third-party services and in a book focussed on mashups that’s disappointing, particularly as the number of services, and so the range of fallback options, is increasing. Some of the examples are likely to fail if services time out and it would be good to spend some time on helping developers avoid that.
Reading the book as someone who has mostly left the PHP fold for pastures new was a reminder of how easy tools like hpricot make life for screen scrapers, but also that good structure can emerge in PHP code and that the SOAP tools are actually quite good for simple uses. The book is unlikely to appeal to those who don’t do much work with PHP, but if you’re a PHP developer and want to dive into mashups and web services for the first time, it’s worth a look.
Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher, and offered another in return for a timely review. You can find it at packt, amazon US, amazon UK and all sorts of other places.
Book Review: Learning jQuery
Oct 14th
As a rails developer most of my experience with javascript libraries has been with prototype and scriptaculous, but I’ve never been quite happy with them. The helper methods built into ActionView make simple tasks a breeze, and I’ve played with the UJS plugin to improve the separation of content and behaviour, but even then the weight of the libraries and the comparable simplicty of tasks like iteration offered by jQuery has always made the grass over there look quite a bit greener.
So when Karl told me that he and Jonathan Chaffer were working on a book about jQuery and offered to send me a copy that seemed like the perfect opportunity to begin making the switch. (that comment should be taken as a disclaimer, by the way.) In the end the timing was fortuitous as I’ve ended up working on a couple of drupal projects (jQuery is included with drupal from version 5 onwards) and having to integrate some jQuery code into a rails project, so I’ve needed to take the lessons learned from the book and quickly put them into practice.
The book takes a gradual pace, introducing the library, and how it handles selectors, events and effects, before moving into DOM manipulation, AJAX and handling forms. Standardistas will be pleased that there is a strong emphasis on progressive enhancement, always starting with pages that achieve their basic intent and then using jQuery to improve the user experience. The authors place considerable emphasis on the importance of providing all users with a solid basic experience and show how jQuery makes it very easy to do so.
More experienced javascript developers may find the pace of the book a little slow (and might prefer to look out for the companion reference volume). The core audience is likely to be those who may have dabbled with the odd snippet, or perhaps used tools that generated javascript for them, but want a step-by-step tutorial that shows how to use jQuery to do things cleanly while building general understanding. Nevertheless, the coverage of more advanced topics like closures is solid and a good reminder even for the more experienced developer.
There were a couple of areas that could have done with a little more exposition, such as the fairly cursory coverage of the difference between GET and POST in HTTP requests (being a purist, I was really looking for mention of PUT and DELETE too), and the fact that without more work one of the shopping cart examples could leave the user thinking their updates had been saved when there was no mechanism to actually make the updates on the server-side. That said, hopefully by that point in the book most readers will be alert to such things and know that the examples are not necessarily production code.
If you’re looking to consolidate your javascript skills and like the look of jQuery, or, like me, you find that sometimes sitting down and reading a book is the best way to familiarise yourself with something, Learning jQuery is well worth your time and money. You can find it at packt, amazon US, amazon UK and all sorts of other places.