Breaking the Silence

Long time, no posts. I have been very busy writing my PHP Design Patterns book, and have left little time for (self|family|blogging|other activities).

First of all, every chapter of the book is done!! Every chapter had to be written, sent to tech review, edited, and then sent to the editors. The final chapter came back from tech review a week ago Sunday, and on Friday night I sent it off to the editors. As I understand the rest of the process, I have to do one more approval of the final layout, then after a short turn around, it goes up as a PDF on the php|architect website. Only a week or two after that, it will be available in hardcopy. Down to the wire, but I am hoping to see the dead tree edition by php|t.

I am really proud of the work which went into the book. The book is basically a pattern catalog. For each pattern, I tried to select an example which exemplifies the pattern in a web development context. Each example was then developed with complete unit tests in SimpleTest. After each example was working to my satisfaction, I would then decide how to show the code in the prose of the chapter. There were a couple of chapters which I basically rewrote from scratch after getting back comments from the tech review, and the results were much stronger chapters. I think the emphasis on testing; the use of both PHP4 and PHP5, and solid examples with UML customized to the examples and the patterns is going to position this book in a strong niche.

Speaking of php|t, all spare minutes are now devoted to polishing of my two presentations on “PHP5 Design Patterns” and “Test Driven Development in PHP”. If you are headed down to Cancun, look me up.

There was another request for code related to my previous book “PHP Graphics Handbook“. I have the code for the second half of the book in this zip file. As I mentioned in this previous post, if you still have access to the last code download, shoot me an email. If you know how to contact either of the other authors, I would be happy to know that as well.