SXSW 2010, PHP for Absolute Beginners, and an Apology

I know I've been silent on here for far too long, but I wouldn't have done it without good reason. Here's what I've been up to over the last two months!

PHP for Absolute Beginners

At long last, I've finally finished my first book! It's called PHP for Absolute Beginners, and it should be on shelves in major booksellers next month sometime. It's already available for preorder on Amazon (though you'll have to forgive the erroneous reference to PHP 6; I've been trying to get that removed for a couple months now), and I'd really appreciate presales.

Despite the title touting the book as written "for absolute beginners," this book should have something for everybody. It covers the construction of a blog from scratch, including using .htaccess to create friendly URLs, resizing and resampling images... read more

JSON: What It Is, How It Works, and How to Use It

My apologies for the lapse in posting; I'm in the midst of finishing my first book for Apress (it's called PHP for Absolute Beginners, and should be out later this year), and it's been consuming most of my attention.

This week, however, I want to cover a topic that I feel has become an important part of any developer's toolkit: the ability to load and manipulate JSON feeds from other sites via AJAX.

Many sites are sharing data using JSON in addition to RSS feeds nowadays, and with good reason: JSON feeds can be loaded asynchronously much more easily than XML/RSS.

This article will cover the following:

• What is JSON?
• Why does JSON matter?
• How do we load JSON into a project?

We'll also use our... read more

• «
• ‹
• 1
• ›
• »