I recently advertised for readers wanting to review a number of books I was offered by Packt Publishing. The fourth review in the series is written by Arthus Erea, who has read AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications.

Review of “AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications”
Review by Arthus Erea

We’ve all heard about that powerful little engine running the latest and greatest websites: AJAX. As developers, many of us probably understand the basics of AJAX, since the technologies behind it (JavaScript and XML) aren’t exactly new. Yet, we’re hesitant to take that first step into using the technology. That’s where AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications steps in with a thorough explanation of AJAX and a plethora of satisfying use cases. With a promise to teach us "how to create better PHP Web Applications by using AJAX technologies to their full potential," we are given a sherpa to help us up the pinnacle of AJAX.

Though the book assumes a basic familiarity with JavaScript and PHP, plenty of attention is paid to the basics. The first chapter delves into some history of the web and an explanation of the buzz around AJAX. It concludes with a quick AJAX application to get you started right away. With a wave of a wand, chapter 2 appears with a solid grounder in the magic of the DOM and smarter JavaScript. Chapter 2 also integrates a primer on XML and its power. With the client satisfied, chapter 3 delves into detail upon the server end of things with lessons upon PHP and MySQL. For the noobs among us,  an appendix is included which details setting up the environment with Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Whether you have never touched a line of PHP in your life or are simply looking to expand your skill set to the client side, "AJAX and PHP" has the basics you need.

With the nitty-gritty technical aspects out of the way, the rest of the book is devoted to various case studies. This is where the true value is found: the examples are both practical and exciting. With the mundane form validation and autosuggest out of the way, even more exciting case studies are introduced. In Chapter 5, we learn about building an AJAX-based web chat application. In Chapter 7, we are introduced to the power of SVG (scalable vector graphics) and how it can be combined with AJAX. For me, the most interesting chapter was chapter 8 which addresses a critical issue in our data-rich world: presenting long tables in an eye-catching and usable manner. Here, we are given a primer on XSLT and grid-based display. Throughout the book, you find sprinkles of useful examples which will certainly come in handy with the continual emphasis upon cloud computing in today’s marketplace.

Despite the strong case studies, "AJAX and PHP" falls short in some critical areas. Most importantly, there is no attention paid to the plethora of JavaScript libraries out there. This is unfortunate, since most of us will end up using a library to automate the simple, repetitive tasks. Additionally, the code samples often are far longer than needed, sometimes stretching over many pages. That being said, the book’s companion site offers downloads of all the case studies to get you started. Overall, AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications is a strong primer on AJAX and a useful reference for the variety of practical AJAX applications.

A while ago I advertised for readers wanting to review a number of books I was offered by Packt Publishing. There was quite a bit of interest and I had to randomly select three readers to receive one of the books. The third reader to get a review published is

Review of “Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development” by Joseph LeBlanc
Review by Robert Parker

Having been a “long time” Joomla! user (I used Mambo before the Mambo development team created Joomla!), I was excited to see this book make it into print. The recent release of Joomla 1.5 (Stable) brings to fruition many months of work toward making the Joomla! development environment more powerful and easier to use than ever before. While many, possibly most, Joomla! users find all the functionality they need in the Joomla! core and the many extensions made available by the community and third-party developers, one of Joomla!’s greatest strengths is its extensibility. This extensibility has for the most part, been primarily of interest to accomplished programmers who are able to “grok” the way Joomla! works internally, and the barriers to creating extensions for “casual users” or beginning programmers have been significant. Granted, there are many tutorials and resources available on the web to help surmount these barriers but, until now, there has not been a book dedicated to making some of this extensibility accessible to the “beginner” who wants to learn to write an extension.

“Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development” is “A practical tutorial for creating your first Joomla! 1.5 extensions with PHP”, and it does a very good job of introducing the fundamentals of using the new Joomla! 1.5 framework. The book provides exactly what it advertises and does not represent itself as a general purpose programming resource. You will not find in depth examination of the Joomla! 1.5 MVC (Model-View-Controller) implementation, or general PHP programming instruction, in its 158 pages (and index of less than three pages). The brevity of the book does not, in my opinion, lessen its usefulness as a tutorial. That said, readers should understand exactly what is provided for the publisher’s $34.99 US asking price.

Joseph LeBlanc’s book provides a very well-structured tour through the process of producing working Joomla! extensions, using an example application for publishing, managing, and manipulating restaurant reviews and producing related enhancements to that base application. I worked through the provided instructions, and code, and found everything working as advertised (readers should visit the publisher’s website to download errata for the code in the book). Working completely through the book will produce a real working extension that can be used “as is” to add a “restaurant reviews” service to a Joomla! site and can be easily modified to provide innumerable similar applications. The extension produced as the “final product” could be changed by the reader to produce an extension for publishing movie reviews, book reviews, concert reviews, a business directory, etcetera; with the framework of the application provided by the author, the reader can use his/her imagination to produce many other extensions.

The book is organized in a logical manner, and the tutorial flows well from chapter to chapter with the user finding no need to prowl around in the book to find explanations of what is going on. Beginning Joomla! developers will appreciate the first chapter’s “overview” material which prepares the reader to use the tools, and understand the terms, that follow. The real fun begins when the second chapter jumps right in “getting started” with developing the extension (component) in the Joomla! environment. There’s no laborious reading before you can start producing results; Chapters 3 and 4 proceed directly to developing the “back end” of the extension (the “under the hood stuff”) and the creation of the “front end” part of the restaurant review system (what is seen by the site visitor). From there, the pace stays brisk as Chapter 5 walks the reader through the process of developing “modules” to add functionality to the extension and provide extra features.

A basic introduction of the MVC framework used by Joomla! 1.5 is included in Chapter 6, where the author explains, in easy to understand terms, how to use models, views, and controllers to enhance the application. I particularly appreciate that the book shows how to use the “built in” tools the Joomla! 1.5 framework provides to save the programmer unnecessary coding and help maintain a “unified” appearance of the extension so that it “walks and talks” like an integral part of the overall Joomla! site.

Chapters 7 and 8 treat the reader to the development of a “plugin” to further enhance the utility of the extension being produced and describes how the developer can use configuration settings (parameters) to further control/customize aspects of the extension. The final chapter shows the reader how to package all the pieces of the project together for distribution and installation in any Joomla! 1.5 web site. While not absolutely necessary for the creation of the extension, this is a great help when it comes time to share your work with the greater Joomla! community.

I found this book to be particularly useful in that it allows anyone to produce a workable extension for Joomla! 1.5 without the considerable learning curve that normally accompanies “first attempts” at using an existing framework. The beginning programmer/reader who is truly interested in delving into the wonders of the Joomla! 1.5 framework will likely be left with many questions about why some of the code works the way it does, but none that will prevent him or her from producing something usable and seeing their first extension come to life. This “gentle” approach to Joomla! development goes a long way toward helping decipher some of the more advanced developers’ documentation provided by the Joomla! project.

While experienced programmers/developers may feel the book gives certain topics short shrift, if you use Joomla!, and have ever wanted to create something for your Joomla! sites that is really “your own” but feel much of the available documentation is too dense or obtuse for you to use, I highly recommend this book.

About the Reviewer:
Robert Parker is a California web developer who often uses Joomla!, and other CMS software, to produce websites for individuals and corporations. A long-time DreamHoster, and one of the Sysops of the DreamHost Wiki, he is an active participant on the DreamHost Discussion Forums where he can be found, on an almost daily basis, posting as “rlparker”.

This time it’s two PHP related books: PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects and Building Responsive Web Applications with AJAX and PHP.

If you would like to receive one of these books in return for a review, please write a comment or send me an email. You will receive a hard copy of the book for you to keep and shipping/handling will be paid by Packt.

Your review should be at least 3-5 paragraphs and be send to me within a reasonable time frame from you receive the book (3-4 weeks). You will of course get full credit for your review and a link to your blog/website.

If there is more than two readers signing up for this opportunity I will randomly select the two lucky readers.

Review of “Moodle Teaching Techniques” by William H Rice IV
Review by Matt Heavner

I’m writing this as an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau. We use “UASOnline” which is a home-grown learning management system which includes some components of moodle.

Overall, this book was a worthwhile read for its intended audience of educators, trainers, or professors who are already familiar with moodle (or, I’d add, another learning management system). Moodle Teaching Techniques shines when it sticks to goal of engaging moodle users in thinking about the most effective methods for teaching with moodle. For example, discussion in Chapter 6 on wiki solutions includes a detailed comparison of wiki vs forum, journal, blog, and assignment specifically focused on relevancy to teaching methods. Another successful chapter is Chapter 4 “Quiz Solutions” which describes effectively using the immediate feedback of online quizzes to enhance student learning. The chapter on Chat also had useful discussion of specific teaching methods to improve learning using moodle.

This book veered off of this prescribed path of discussing moodle teaching techniques in two directions. Sometimes too much technical detail regarding an obscure moodle (or worse, network setting) issue was covered in 5 or more pages. The most egregious waste of pages in the book are the section on “Host a Proctored, Timed Test from a Secure Location”. This is probably an important concept for many users of moodle, but the author feels secure in not spending a single word of the text on installation and configuration initially, so why the author would spend pages 77-82 on details such as non-routable IP spaces is not at all clear. The greatest irony of this is that due to a typo in the Figure on page 80, a single IP address is repeated for both networks, completely invalidating the example. Another unneeded lengthy discussion occurs at the beginning of Chapter 2. Pages 21-29 are spent on configuring a single-student forum. As this was the first main chapter, I felt completely derailed after the lofty introduction about learning methods that would be discussed because the author felt the need to spend so much time on a moodle work-around/hack. Another cognitive disconnect in the text occurred in Chapter 5. Immediately after introducing the idea of “moodling through a course” in any order the student desires (on page 87), the author states “We don’t want our students to ‘meander’ or wander through the course items”. I was looking forward to a discussion of when “moodling” through the course may enhance learning and when a more structured series of sequential activities would be better for learning. There was no such discussion, just a six page exposition on how to force flow control onto a class moodle installation.

I would love to see an additional 50 pages added to this book, with 20 pages of the configuration discussion converted to effective teaching methods discussion to add an additional 70 total pages of teaching discussion. I felt the last four chapters were much too brief and did not give enough discussion of teaching methodology of four different techniques which seemed to hold high potential. I would also suggest that Chapter 9 be moved to follow Chapter 1 as it is an overview of “Course Solutions”–and more fleshed out overview of moodle learning concepts in the course context would be a good starting point rather than a detailed discussion of a work-around to setup an individual student forum. Chapter 8 could be expanded and also brought in earlier in the book–if indeed the choice activity discussed in this chapter is “the simplest type of activity” moodle offers. Beginning with an overview of the class and then the simplest activity for a specific example would improve the flow of the book as well as provide much more direct discussion of moodle teaching techniques.

To summarize, I recommend this book to users of learning management systems such as moodle. Several thought provoking sections should enhance a reader’s thoughts regarding effective teaching using moodle or some other learning management system. However, the digressions into unnecessary moodle work-arounds or network configuration discussion are distracting.

I recently received a review copy of WordPress Complete by Hasin Hayder and published by Packt Publishing. The back cover of the book explains that the book is a beginner’s guide, while also saying “any IT-confident user will be able to use the book to produce an impressive blog.”

WordPress Complete is divided into ten chapters. The first entails the basics of blogging and the book progresses all the way to usage of WordPress MU (multiuser).

Chapter 1 provides a beginner’s guide to blogging. It explains blogging and the different types of blogs (audio, video, etc), and also provides a list of common terminology. I found the list of common terms a little lacking; it did not include “theme” or “plug-in”, while it provided an incomplete explanation of permalinks. The first chapter also provides a good overview of the major blogging engines (providers and software), but in a copyediting gaffe, the screenshots of each engine are on the page immediately following the description of the engine. The end of this chapter describes using the WordPress forums, finding themes, finding plug-ins, and getting news about WordPress.

Chapter 2 provides the basics of installing WordPress and the first actions when setting up a new blog. Chapter 3 deals with themes, and details the popular places to find themes, how to install them, and how to make basic changes to the design.

Chapter 4 explains posting, and all the options related to posting new items in WordPress. Chapter 4 also explains comments and the administrative settings regarding comments. While the book touches on the topic of comment spam in this chapter, it provides no useful resources in stopping spam. Especially surprising is that the book does not discuss Akismet, the spam fighting tool created by the makers of WordPress. The book also explains gravatars, but makes no effort to explain implementing gravatars into a WordPress installation.

Chapter 5 describes using using WordPress as a content management system, or CMS, to run a website (as opposed to a blog). This mainly entails editing a theme to make WordPress look less like a blog and more like a website for a business. This section is really important and provides some insight into a rarely used ability of WordPress.

Chapter 6 describes feeds (syndication) and podcasting. This chapter goes way too in-depth when explaining feeds, because WordPress provides feeds automatically. A WordPress beginner does not need to know the complete history of the RSS 2.0 format or the HTML behind a feed. The podcasting section, though, provides a useful in-depth look at audio blogging that would be especially helpful for those wishing to utilize WordPress to podcast.

Chapter 7 goes through the motions of making a theme for WordPress. While providing a good look at how themes work, this Chapter is not needed for the beginning blogger. There are thousands of WordPress themes out there for beginners to use, while those who wish to create their own most likely already know where to find this information and would not be buying this book.

Chapter 8 discusses using WordPress MU (multiuser) to multi-blog, and Chapter 9 tells of how to create plug-ins and widgets.

Chapter 10 might provide the best information for the beginning WordPress user. This chapter describes how to backup a WordPress blog (something few users do and many regret not doing) and how to upgrade to a newer version of WordPress.

Overall I found the book very informative and useful for the beginning WordPress user. I did, however, take issue to the large number of spelling, grammar, and English language usage mistakes. The preface of the book contained the most glaring error, misspelling “blog” as “blod”, which is extremely ironic when one remembers the subject of the book. If you can overlook the many errors in the book (I cringed many times while reading elementary mistakes), WordPress Complete is a nearly complete beginner’s guide to WordPress.

The three books are all about one of DreamHost’s One-Click Installs: the blogging engine WordPress, the Joomla! CMS and the brand new course management system Moodle.

• WordPress Complete
• Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development
• Moodle Teaching Techniques

If any of you readers would like to receive one of these books in return for a review, please write a comment or send me an email. You will receive a hard copy of the book for you to keep and shipping/handling will be paid by Packt.

Your review should be at least 3-5 paragraphs and be send to me within a reasonable time frame from you receive the book (3-4 weeks). You will of course receive full credit for your review and a link to your blog/website.

If there is more than three readers signing up for this opportunity I will randomly select the lucky three.