Category: Book Reviews

MODX: The Official Guide – Book Review

If you closely follow the happenings in the world of MODX you know that Bob Ray’s book MODX: The Official Guide.
is now available.  I was fortunate to receive a copy of the unreleased PDF a few weeks ago and have been looking through it. Now that the book is available for pre-order, I thought it would be a good idea to share my thoughts.

First, I want to say that the release of this book is really exciting and a great step forward for the MODX community.  This is not the first MODX book to be published. The first one was written in Japanese and covered MODx Evolution.  This was followed later by two books published by Packt that also covered Evolution.  I have, of course, not read the Japanese book but have looked at the two Packt books, and I can comfortably say that Bob’s book far supercedes either of the Packt books and is far superior product to either of them, and I recommend it without reservations.

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Head First iPhone Development – Book Review

HeadFirstiPhoneI have recently been reading and working through the excellent O’Reilly book Head First iPhone Development.  iPhone apps have proven to be a big hit, with apps for everything you can think of!  It’s getting even more interesting now with the iPad. I know this is a bit of deviation from my usual posts and topics, but if you have any interest in iPhone development and have been thinking about getting into it, you will want to read this post to the end 🙂

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HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions – Book Review

I’ve been spending some time in the recent past revisiting my knowledge of (X)HTML/CSS, and one of the big things I’ve discovered is that I have more I need to unlearn than to learn.  I learned everything I know about building websites on the internet, by experimenting, searching w3c schools for syntax rules and tags, and learning by looking at other people’s source code. This is the first time I’ve actually bought and gone through a book on this stuff, and I am so glad I did – wish I has done so earlier!  If you’re just starting out, or like me feel like you need to learn the right way, or just want a nice (X)HTML/CSS book for your collection, I have just the book for you, it’s HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions – A Web Standardistas’ Approach by Christopher Murphy and Niklas Person.  This post is a review of the book.

htmlandcsswebstandardistas

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Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide Book – Initial Impressions

I recently got a copy of the new Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook by Dorien Herremans to review. I am currently working through it and will be putting up a comprehensive review soon, but I wanted to share my initial impressions with you, having read through the first few chapters and skimmed the rest of the book.  Let me preface this all by saying that I am really really looking forward to working though this book.


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Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 – Book Review

building_websites_d6Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 by David Mercer is what I believe is the ultimate beginner’s book for Drupal.  While the other books that I’ve reviewed here focuses on how to build a particular type of website (Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions for a small business website and Drupal 6 Social Networking for social networking sites), Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 looks at Drupal as a whole for any type of website.

This book walks you from the very beginning, introducing you to Drupal, how to set up a development environment and install Drupal, all the way to how to deploy your completed website.   Early on in the book the author introduces you to the Drupal.org website and how to use it, which is a very useful section since the Drupal website is the ultimate Drupal resource and you need to be familiar with navigating and finding (and even sharing) information and resources.

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