I have to admit I got a lot more out of the book on the 2nd read as I was already into the first few weeks of thebshow (shameless plug – thebshow.podbean.com).  I would most assuredly advise potential podcasters to be to just start releasing anything and worry about the technical details in progress (like I said – I got a lot more out of the book when I was actually applying these techniques or had already done so).

This book is totally and completely worth buying.

Podcasting For Dummies (For Dummies (Computers))

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(27 customer reviews)

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The period from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s was one of these for the computer industry. In the span of about 5-7 years an amazing range of technologies became accessible; perhaps the one with the most lasting impact was the nearly universal adoption of the graphical user interface and, while Microsoft eventually brought it to the world, without the Macintosh’s elegant example, it’s difficult to imagine what the dominant user interface would look like today. This book is a collection of stories from some of the people who where there.

As an aside, If the title sounds familiar, this book was orginally published in 2005 as a hardcover book, this is the 2011 softcover edition by O’Reilly and I didn’t see any notes on differences between the two. Also, I’m reading this book along with Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs and I’d recommend doing the same. While Revolution is specifically about the Mac and filled with a lot more details about the period when it was being developed, Isaacson’s book is less-technical and but much broader covering Jobs’ whole life and fills in a lot of the gaps about what was happening in the background while the Mac was being developed, before and after.

So what does this book offer readers? Well remember that a lot of the Mac’s impact on computing was that it was the first (successful) computer with a graphical user interface, so a lot of this book is about the whole creation of the interface, it’s influences and the way it evolved; there are some fascinating screenshots of early versions and some great stories and photos, as well as things that didn’t work out. If you’ve got a Mac user on your holiday list, this is probably a book they’d enjoy.

Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made

Price: $7.64

(52 customer reviews)

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Drupal User’s Guide

Like many books, this one starts with an overview of Drupal, installing, administrating and putting together a simple site. After the basics are covered, the book goes into planning a site and figuring out what you want your site to do and who will use it.

The heart of the book is the case studies that follow in the third section. Case Studies, takes the reader though building two websites: a community forum and a business directory. These two are fairly complex projects that might have caused users to investigate Drupal in the first place. The projects make use of core and contributed modules that are listed at the beginning of the section.

After the case studies, the next two sections expand on material covered earlier in the book. Section four, Build Anything, goes deeper into modules, content types and covers some essential modules, such as the very useful Views, in more detail. Then part five, Extending Drupal, covers theming, SEO and accessibility. The theming section takes readers though creating a new theme on top of a base theme. Readers of this section should be familiar with HTML, CSS and some basic very basic PHP to make use of this section.

Hogbin describes this book as a “prequel” to her other book, and it is, while Front End Drupal was written for experienced developers, this book is aimed more at beginners to Drupal who are familiar with web design and are comfortable with of HTM, CSS and maybe a bit of PHP for the later sections. While one of the unique features of Drupal is how much can be done from the GUI, it’s probably best be comfortable with editing HTML without the help of Dreamweaver.  One criticism of the book is there occasionally there are mentions of things like a single mention of Drush (a powerful command-line interface for Drupal mentioned on page 166) but no further information, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to investigate. The layout is good, a few black-and-white screen-shots and some diagrams.

Overall this a good book for web designers taking Drupal for a test drive. The example projects presented here aren’t too simple to be completely removed from the kinds of websites they are be hoping Drupal will help them build.

Drupal User’s Guide: Building and Administering a Successful Drupal-Powered Web Site

Price: $23.17

(8 customer reviews)

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If last-year’s Professional WordPress is the must-have book for WordPress developers, then Definitive is at least the equivalent for Drupal developers; even given the relative differences in complexity between the two frameworks, this book simply provides more chapters on the details that aren’t strictly necessary for developing with Drupal such as Drush, a command line shell and scripting interface, that I wasn’t even aware of before picking up this book or the coverage of Git version control system that’s replacing SVN among Drupal developers.

That said, I’d be hesitant to call this a beginners book on Drupal, and that’s not because there’s chapters on coding modules or writing test cases, because on the other hand there are parts where it’s all clicking through the GUI and installing modules, like you might be doing with another CMS. No, it’s more that with Drupal the “coding” part isn’t far from the GUI, maybe it’s that I find Drupal tries to let site administrators do a lot of things from the web interface that other frameworks would hide a bit more, or basically say, “This is what administrators can do, anything past here you need a developer.” Add into this the way many modules are intended to build on each other rather than the more monolithic plug-ins found in other CMS and you start to understand the mystique (e.g. the oft-heard comment that “Drupal is a CMS construction kit”) that’s built-up around Drupal since its birth.

One of the chapters that is good at getting beyond that is Stefan Freudenberg’s chapter Under the Hood, that provides readers will all the details of the sequence of events; there’s even a good flow chart on p.693 of when hooks are called. One of the biggest challenges when learning a new framework is understanding the big picture and at the same time getting enough of the details to know where to look when it comes to attacking a problem. With frameworks, there are always lots of way to do something but knowing how the framework was designed to do something is going to make your work a lot easier. Maybe you are going to want to do something that the framework wasn’t meant to do, but probably if you’re dealing with a framework that’s been around for 10+ years someone has tried to twist it into the particular type of pretzel you’ve got in mind.

The structure of the book is basically one moving from simpler tasks though more complex. Many chapters are built around a small project, usually related to building the DefinativeDrupal.org website. Of course, theming is an essential part to of building a site. I’m sometimes a bit leery about books that try and cram designing themes in with writing modules and such, fortunately this book has room to give them a proper treatment with chapters written by authors who are actual designers using Drupal. The layout is easy to read, black and white diagrams and some screen-shots. The book’s appexdix cover setting up development systems on Windows, Mac and Ubuntu Linux.

In closing, unless you’re pretty comfortable with PHP and MySQL then I wouldn’t recommend it as maybe the first book to pick up on Drupal. The book doesn’t teach PHP, SQL or JavaScript beyond Drupal’s jQuery/UI support in the section on theming.  If you are comfortable with PHP/MySQL already, then it will teach you pretty much anything you want to know about Drupal, it really is a one-stop guide to the current version of Drupal and you’re unlikely to come across a book that covers more Drupal material in one spot, though I hear Drupal 8 is in development.

Links:
DefinitiveDrupal.org
twitter.com/dgd7
Definitive Drupal 7 at Apress

The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 (Definitive Guide Apress)

Price: $30.10

(19 customer reviews)

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The technologies developed under the banner “HTML5” promise to open up a lot more avenues for game developers, from creating bitmap games using the well-supported Canvas tag, to standardized support for audio and video (in case anyone wants to re-create Myst!) to even 3D with the newest releases of FireFox and Chrome (the two browsers arguably pushing ahead the fastest).

The first four chapters are what you’d expect: a bit of an overview of HTML5, how to set-up a developer environment, an introduction to JavaScript and games. The first chapter on HTML5 is good reading, just because “HTML5” is used as a catch-all for so many different things, it’s really important these days to figure out what someone means when they say “HTML5.” Considering to that on page 150 there’s mention of HP’s exit from the WebOS hardware business, which is barely 2 months old, this book is pretty up to date and presents that different approaches being taken, for instance in the case of a databases where WebKit and FireFox have decided on two different types and no formal HTML5 spec exists. However much of the bleeding-edge features are supported in different browsers specific ways, so the book introduces readers to a range of libraries are used in book to get around the incompatibilities as well as easing the work of developers; in fact that’s probably a good way of summarizing this book: a tour of the libraries you could build games using in the browser.

A bit surprisingly one library introduced is Prototype and its extensions to JavaScript’s object orientation. There’s been a lot written about how Prototype tries to make JavaScript more like the Ruby language (which in its original role as a helper for Ruby on Rails made some sense) and the potential problems it can cause,  when used with other libraries, it’s introduction here seems to be mostly for it being the foundation to the Simple Game Framework which is covered in chapter four, How Games Work. Besides jQuery and Prototype, the book introduces readers to a lot of libraries including: Trient.js (canvas animation), RaphaëlJS(svg helper), Three.js (WebGL helper), and those are just the browser-side helpers.

Many books on game programming start with a simple game and gradually expand it over the course of the book, or else introduce several mini-games to show different methods. This book doesn’t really do that, it’s more of a tour of different libraries that can be used to build games.  There isn’t a lot of the game mechanics I was kind of expecting, but that’s partly because many of these libraries take care of the basics for you, the other reason is a lot of the code is found on the book’s website, rather than re-printed in the book. Some readers might find it a bit un-focused since it doesn’t have an over-arching project and tries to cover a lot in its 200-odd pages, everything from 2D with Canvas and SVG libraries to 3D with Three.js to JavaScript on the server with Node.js, but for readers looking to figure out what’s available then this book is a good start.

Learning HTML5 Game Programming: A Hands-on Guide to Building Online Games Using Canvas, SVG, and WebGL

Price: $19.29

(10 customer reviews)

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One theme that comes up a lot in the book is understanding who is using your application. Right from the first chapter it starts with finding out who your user is and what is the job they are trying to do. Besides research, testing an interface and getting feedback is a constant subject, a lot more than many other interface books seem to focus on. Like Neuo Web Design, there’s a lot of psychology cited and weaved into this book. One aspect I liked was how it used examples from many different areas, such as computer mice or video games in later chapters. In fact, learning from video games comes up at several points in the book.

A big part of this book is on how to test designs before writing any code. In fact the whole “Implementation” section is mostly about designing tests and collecting information. It’s pretty in-depth and covers a lot of information that isn’t usually found in books like this.

There are of course chapters on making interfaces functionality discoverable and consistent, which is expected, but there’s also chapters on writing for the web and how readers hunt and scan pages for information rather than read them as they might a newspaper. Another chapter covers an idea that is known to designers but not really covered in interface design: simplifying and knowing when to leave things out. Of course, tablets are covered in this book too, focusing on the non-obvious differences between a touch interface and a mouse interface such as how easy it is to reach buttons on a screen. Each of the chapters are fairly short (5-6 pages) and there’s usually some illustrations or black and white photos to illustrate topics – a bit sparse but makes reading quick.

For readers looking for too much implementation details, say like programming with the latest copy of jQuery UI, they will be disappointed, there isn’t a line of JavaScript, or any other computer languages, to be found in this book’s 300-odd pages. In closing, this is an interface design book that starts readers off with understanding the user and their needs by drawing on both practical examples and mixing in relevant psychology and keeps coming back to that idea of understanding the user and testing ideas way before any code is written.

Links:
Book’s website
Author’s website

Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web

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(5 customer reviews)

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Fortunately things have come a long way since then,  but there is still a lot of gaps, even if you’re just dealing with the main Android and iPhone devices.

Besides a ton of practical advice, the book focuses on two things: thinking about how the user will use your app and keeping in mind that there are a lot of different types of mobile devices out now and design with that in mind.

On that last point, the book mostly focuses on the two platforms (Android and iOS) with the largest user base, though Blackberry and even care covered in places. I did not find any mentions of Windows Phone however, while that might be due to its small market share, considering that, unlike all the others that base their browsers on WebKit, Windows Phone 7, not surprisingly, uses the mobile version of Internet Explorer 9 with the Trident engine.

The book starts with the an introduction and listing the reasons and ways to develop mobile. When I was building the mobile version of Lounge666 doing a separate mobile site was the only way that made sense, today there are ways of getting around that with things like media queries (covered in later chapters).

Chapter two is “Design for Mobile” and covers how to think about a mobile site, especially on how they are different from desktop browsing, but don’t box users in either. This is a good general introduction to designing a website. It introduces a web app for reporting celebrity sightings that will be developed over the course of the book.

Chapter three covers HTML5 and CSS3 features available today. Fortunately you don’t really have to worry about really old browsers as people tend to upgrade their phones more often than desktop computers. The best selling smart phones today support a lot of advanced features including JavaScript that simply wasn’t available even 3-4 years ago. The book covers libraries like Modernizer that help figure out the capabilities of a browser.

Chapters four through six cover building a mobile application, starting with covering CSS3 features to assemble a basic application and expanding it over the next two chapters to track location and pull lists of nearby venues using FourSquare’s API. Other feature include HTML5’s offline caching and a bit on WebSQL.

The last two chapters are built around PhoneGap, an open-source tool that lets developers turn websites into stand-alone applications that can be submitted as applications to the major application markets for Android, iPhone and Blackberry. These chapters are pretty straightforward and provide some practical steps for getting your new app on the market.

Besides the understandable lack of Windows Phone coverage, this is another good practical book from SitePoint. If you want to check out more of this book, head over to the book’s website – there’s three chapters available to download.

Links:
Book’s home page: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/mobile1/

Build Mobile Websites and Apps for Smart Devices

Price: $34.09

(5 customer reviews)

54 used & new available from $31.00

The best instruction books don’t just tell you how to do something, or why things are done a certain way, they are forward looking to how things will likely be done in the future, educated guesses backed up with facts. With HTML5 Guidelines, Klaus Förster and Bernd Öggl have put together a set of 12 chapters on  different technologies that are under development for the HTML5 standard. As the book says numerous times, the standard is evolving and while some parts, like <canvas> are already widely supported, others like MathML are not yet, and others like <video> and geo-location are still being hashed out and consistent behaviour across browsers can not be assumed.

The book starts off with a bit of history of how HTML5 came out of the failure of XHTML2 to gain acceptance and the desire for HTML4.1 to continue to be developed rather than be extended willy-nilly by browser makers, an outcome that at worst would be like returning back to the days when Netscape and Microsoft played one-up with each other extending HTML in incompatible ways.

The chapters in the book cover: Structure and semantics for documents, Intelligent forms, Video and audio, Canvas, SVG and MathML, Geolocation, Web storage and offline web applications, WebSockets, Web Workers, Microdata and other improvements.

The first chapter on Structure and semantics, which introduces the new HTML tags (<article>. <content>, <footer> and <header> among others) designed to make it easier for computers to understand content on a webpage, in the same way <h1> tags are used to signal to search engines that the content is important. Much of this can be used today and JavaScript libraries like Modernizr (that detect a browser’s support for various CSS3 and HTML features) are mentioned as tools developers might want to use.

The chapter on the <canvas> element is particularly in-depth and that’s partly because <canvas> is one of the best supported HTML5 features. On the other hand, the HTML5 <video> mess is addressed with examples of how to support H.264, WebM and Theora video in a compatible ways. Since the best selling tablet today only supports H.264, there’s some good information for developers who will need to support it as well as newer Android tablets coming only the market.

While the audio and visual features get a lot of attention, HTML5 promises to improve the web experience and make it possible to mimic traditional desktop applications. Among these improvements are better form elements, off-line storage, geo-location and some general improvements like spell-checking and drag and drop files. Those last two are already part of Firefox and Chrome, but this aims to standardize them.

In closing, this is a good solid book on how to use HTML5 as it exists today. The 12 chapters that make up the book cover most of what developers have available to them today.  To borrow William Gibson’s best-known quote, HTML5 is here it’s just not completely supported in one place; or in other words, the features that will probably be part of HTML5 are support today in different browsers, but no one browser supports them all. This book will help you navigate through that fact.

Website: http://html5.komplett.cc/code/index_en.html

HTML5 Guidelines for Web Developers

Price: $21.97

(8 customer reviews)

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First, the book is aimed at non-developers, the first two chapters of the book cover Joomla’s history and the different ways to install Joomla. Chapters that follow cover setting up users, creating and organizing content and navigation. If you’ve set-up a Drupal site, a lot of this will be quite familiar.

Starting with chapter seven, extensions are covered. Some of these are built-in, but many more are findable at the Joomla website. When it comes to extensions, Joomla breaks them down into three groups: Components, Modules, Plug-ins. Components include things like photo-galleries, banners and others that are like mini-applications, usually with a administrator and public parts. Modules are smaller parts that usually appear on the site in boxes on the layout, examples of modules found on most sites include: the footer, log-in or a block displaying the newest content items. Finally, plug-ins are extensions that react to events (possibly triggered by other components or modules) and can be used for things like filtering out swearing from user comments or adding social-bookmarking buttons to articles. One of the thing this book does well is introduce readers to some of the better known extensions and how to find and evaluate their suitability for a project.

Of course, no CMS would be complete without a theming system. Templates are explained in chapter 10. Readers are shown how to modify templates but not create one from scratch.

After 11 chapters on the workings of Joomla, there are two chapters on putting together a simple personal and business site using some new extentions. The book then wraps-up with three chapters on users management, languages and site administration.

For a reader new to Joomla, this is a good book to explain how to get going understand how the whole system fits together and putting together a simple site.

Links:
Book’s website: http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321703782
Extensions explained: http://docs.joomla.org/Tutorial:What_Are_Extensions

Joomla! Explained: Your Step-by-Step Guide (Joomla! Press)

Price: $20.99

(28 customer reviews)

60 used & new available from $16.95

With any system as extensive as Drupal (not to mention being in development for over 10 years), there are a lot things related to how the whole  system fits together and the terminology used. To that end, the book does a good job of explaining things from numerous flow-charts showing where hooks, actions and triggers are invoked (as well as what the differences between hooks and actions are); this is particularly useful for developers coming from other content systems where this terms might be used slightly differently. Also, the book teaches fundamental concepts of how things are supposed to work in Drupal, for instance, a section on page 301 covers filtering data and explains the principal of how it’s not recommended to changing a user’s data, rather store it as-is, then filter it as need be); these things are necessary to know so that when writing your own Drupal modules, they behave in a way that fits in with user’s expectations of how things work in Drupal.

Like any large framework, understanding the parts, how they fit together and the terminology used to describe this is essential to make use of a framework like Drupal. Drupal has been called a toolkit for creating CMS rather than a CMS. This is probably a bit extreme, but it’s true that it’s true that Drupal is not exactly one thing out of the box in the way WordPress is a blog first without customization, yet on the other hand, because it’s not designed primarily to display posts, this gives it some more flexibility. One of the most useful things I heard was that in Drupal, modules are like ingredients that you combine together to customize the system, this is different than say, plug-ins in WordPress where a plug-in solves one particular problem. Drupal has an advanced system for organizing data by taxonomy, vocabularies, with flat and hierarchical structures.

If you’ve already been using Drupal, then parts of this book will still be of interest; Drupal 7 has incorporated several features that used to be modules in Drupal 6, including the CCK (Content Creation Kit), the database abstraction layer, testing system and a host of other features; a full list can be found here: http://drupal.org/about/new-in-drupal-7.

Links:

• http://www.apress.com/9781430228387
• http://www.unleashedmind.com/en/blog/sun/more-than-50-drupal-modules-moved-into-drupal-7
• http://drupal.org/about/new-in-drupal-7

Pro Drupal 7 Development (Expert’s Voice in Open Source)

Price: $31.49

(16 customer reviews)

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