Cool Tool for Web Developers: XAMPP

I'm currently reading PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide. So far I'm loving this book because it is straightforward useful stuff. I'll get more into why I like it so much when I post the review. One of the more useful things I've been introduced to through this book is XAMPP.

When I got the book I knew I was going to have to download a program to run PHP and MySQL. After I started reading I realized I would also need to run Apache for my server which makes sense if I'd thought about it beforehand. I don't really like configuring software. I feel like I should as a software person but it really just irks me. The idea of finding, downloading and configuring all these components and making them work together seemed daunting.

The book referred me to the appendix for installation instructions where it introduced me to XAMPP. The XAMPP website describes the product better than I can. "XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start." They aren't kidding. It really is that easy. It took me about 15 minutes to download, configure, and start using the Apache server with PHP and MySQL! The ease of installation is the main cause of my excitement, but as a bonus it is also free (under the GNU GPL license). Where there's free there's me!

So obviously, I'm a believer so far. I'll make updates if I find some undesirable features. It is important to know that the default settings that XAMPP uses to install the Apache server are not recommended for a full production server. The security settings are just not secure enough. Take some time to educate yourself on security settings if you are creating a production environment. For me, I just want something for learning PHP and MySQL on my local computer. For that purpose, security is less of a problem. I realize that someone can type your IP to reach the server, so you probably shouldn't leave it running all the time even as a test only box.

If you are interested in checking out XAMPP, download it here.

If you are the type that likes to watch a video tutorial on setup check out Jimmy Ruska's YouTube tutorial.

Book Review: the Zen of CSS design

Whew... It took me forever to finish The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag. Honestly, this was a tough book to get through.

The book started with a brief introduction. The book is basically an in depth look at the website CSS Zen Garden. The introduction and first chapter introduced the website and it's purpose. CSS Zen Garden was created when CSS was a newcomer on the web scene. People were using CSS, but not to universally and not to its full potential. CSS Zen Garden was created for designers to submit amazing designs that really pushed the envelope to show what was possible with CSS. The remaining chapters highlighted some of the submissions and used them as a starting point to talk about different attributes of CSS design such as layout, typography, special effects, etc.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I liked that I was given practical examples of how CSS could be used. There is a lot to be learned from viewing the success of others. A lot of useful and advanced topics were covered throughout the book. On the other hand, I didn't like that the book didn't give many practical examples of how the CSS was actually executed. In the book's defense, you can easily go online and view the source, but when explaining how certain layouts are done I feel like a scaled down example would be beneficial. There were no working examples in the book so there is little hands on activity to be done.

Overall, I don't think I'll be purchasing this book. I think it was worth the read, but I doubt I'll go back to it for reference. I would recommend this book to designers and developers who are already fairly comfortable with CSS and are looking for fresh ideas.

Cool Tool for Web Developers: Web Developer by Chris Pederick

I'm reading through The Zen of CSS Design and I stumbled upon an awesome resource. If you are getting started developing for the web or a seasoned professional you will love this tool! Are you ready for this? Web Developer 1.18 by Chris Pederick.

This is a Firefox/Chrome plugin gives the user access to tons of useful web developer tools. You can automatically validate the CSS and HTML, resize the window, enable/disable CSS styles, and much more. My favorite feature so far is displaying the div order. This outlines all the divs on the page. You can use this on pages you develop for error checking or on other sites that you may be analyzing to learn from.

I'm sold on this tool. You can check it out on Chris Pederick's website.

Book Review: Designing with Web Standards

Another book down! I just finished Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards (3rd Edition). This book is widely respected and Zeldman has had quite an impact on the move for designers and developers to embrace standards.

I took away a lot of good lessons from this book:

• Standards should make things easier! This is not really very intuitive. Adding rules usually makes things more complicated. Standards, however, should make your code more readable, maintainable, accessible, and portable between browsers.
• Standards improve SEO. I am admittedly ignorant when it comes to SEO. I really have no idea what makes a site turn up at the top of a search engine list. Zeldman's message is that the best thing you can do to improve SEO is to write standardized code with meaningful ids, classes, etc. This can get lost in translation when using a code generating program.
• IE6 is a thorn in the web developer's side. Zeldman often paints a beautiful picture of how the standard works in all modern browsers. Then he goes on to make you cry over how IE6 butchered something and makes things not work. There are some workarounds in the book, but overall it is just painful to support IE6. It seems that Microsoft is behind the curve constantly when it comes to browsers. I won't let my bias come through too strongly, but seriously...no surprise here.
• It's important to stay on the cutting edge. Things are changing constantly with browser support of features, HTML5, CSS3, and web design trends. To stay competitive in web design and development, continuing education is critical.

I learned a lot of good theory and mental practices from this book. For what the book intended to do, I think it did a great job. I like to look at things from a more practical and hands on approach with a developers perspective and that was not the intention of this book.

Some things I would have liked to see improved:

• No downloadable code! For as simple as it is to add the code examples to a website I feel like it should never be left out. There weren't a ton of examples, but I still wanted to try them out. Some of the code was very repetitive and not so much for learning as just getting a working example.
• A lot of topics just skimmed the surface. If the book covered everything in depth it would be 10,000 pages long. I understand that not everything could be covered fully. However, without a lot of experience certain chapters left me desiring more explanation. The typography chapter was the toughest for someone without typography experience.
• Code beautification. This is totally nit-picky, but I have serious issues with code that is hard to read because of indentation and trying to fit everything on one line rather than spacing things out. There were several examples in the book that were intended to be the right way to do things that were an indentation cluster. For a book focused on standards and making code easier to maintain and use I expected more.

Overall I enjoyed this book. It is useful for designers as well as developers. While I found this book educational, I think the companion book, Developing with Web Standards by John Allsopp would be more to my liking.

Where There's Free There's Me!: Dive Into HTML5

I came across a free book on HTML5 this week.  I started reading it, but it's pretty long so I'm going to finish it up sometime in the future.  From reviews and reading the first chapter I can already say it's going to be good.  Mark Pilgrim wrote Dive Into HTML5.  It is released under the CC-BY-3.0 license so it's free to read online.  If you love holding a paper copy you can also buy the print copy from Amazon.

Book Review: Head First JavaScript

Yesterday, I finished Head First JavaScript.  This is my second Head First book and it was exactly as expected as far as the learning process was concerned.  I really like Head First's approach to learning.  It makes difficult concepts understandable to everyone.

This book is structured much like other programming language books.  Data storage, decision making, loops and functions are all covered.  Toward the end of the book concepts that are more unique to JavaScript are covered such as forms, DOM, objects, and dynamic data.

When I read Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML I had nothing but praise in my review.  The JavaScript book is a little bit different.  Although I thought it was very informative and worth the read, it had a few glaring weaknesses.

Keeping JavaScript functions in a separate file was briefly touched on and then rarely used throughout the rest of the book.  I am all about practicing good habits and I didn't feel like this technique was reinforced.

The examples were not as workable as the Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML examples.  The were much longer and provided by the book website.  This was fine, but I found that I could probably go the entire book without writing a line of code which was discouraging.  It took some self motivation to try to do some of it myself.

Finally, the book did not cover or even mention some important advanced topics in JavaScript such as Events and Try...Catch.  I realize everything can't be covered in the scope of this book, but at least some mention of them would have been nice.

Overall, this book was worth the read, but the time may have been better spent reading a more comprehensive JavaScript book.  Next time I read a JavaScript book it will probably be JavaScript: The Definitive Guide.

The 4-Hour Workweek - Chapter 5 Comfort Challenge: Learn to Propose

The challenge for the last two days has been to learn to propose.  The goal of this challenge was to stop asking for the opinions of others and propose solutions.  When I read this challenge I knew it would be difficult for me.  I'm a very go with the flow person so my automatic response to "What do you want to do later" is "I dunno, what to do you want to do."

This challenge was harder to practice than learning to eye gaze because there are less opportunities.  Obviously, you make eye contact with people as long as people are around.  Proposing solutions doesn't come up in every conversation you have.

I caught myself in this situation a few times are tried to propose solutions.  Usually they were good, but at worst they started a discussion that at least made progress to a solution.  The only time I failed was suggesting having lunch outside and then getting stuck in the rain.  I wouldn't consider that a terrible failure though.

In one conversation I fell back into old habit when having a conversation with co-workers about what time we should start working on our off day.  My response was "whenever is good with you guys," which turned into everyone passing the torch and blankly staring at each other.  Proposing a solution would have made this conversation shorter, more decisive, and less awkward.

I'd like to make this a practice in my daily life.  I saw a lot of benefit to be part of the solution rather than a bump on a log.