[Crossposted with Deb's blessing to announce, grrltalk and techtalk. Apologies to those who have to delete it 3 times.] A few days after I subscribed to the LinuxChix lists, sometime in October or November of '99, I saw a message from an editor at a publishing company, looking for folks who wanted to write books. I actually got off my lazy rear-end and replied, and 5 months later a book was born! It was all very exciting. I wrote about PHP, this wacky cool scripting language that all of a sudden has taken the web development world by storm. (see http://www.php.net/ for more info on PHP) The book is called PHP Essentials, and you can read all about it, download the code in it, etc. at its supplementary web site: http://www.thickbook.com/ My primary goal was to write the kind of book that you could hold on your lap without bruising yourself, and a book that anyone could learn something from, not just someone with a degree or two in computer science (because I don't have one!). Ultimately, I wanted to write a book that someone could take off the shelf, skim through, and say, "Hey, this PHP thing looks like a neat language, and ever-so-easy to learn!" If you've been thinking about dabbling in programming and didn't know where to start, I suggest PHP, and I suggest this book. I'm just a little biased. The book is "learn by example", from installing PHP and a web server to "Hello World!" scripts and eventually database administration and e-commerce-y stuff. All in 386 pages or less, and it won't scare the hell out of you. I've earmarked a bunch of my free copies for LinuxChix readers, and I'm using the old "enter a quasi-weekly random drawing" approach to giving them away. If you're interested, please visit http://www.thickbook.com/lchx_survey1.phtml After you go off and learn PHP, remember that it is open source! As a bonus, the development community is really, really wonderful. You will _not_ find the "you're a girl, you can't play here!" mentality. Heck, people are even nice when someone says "I'm using PHP on Windows 95/98/2000/NT and IIS...." :) PHP grows by leaps and bounds every day, because someone comes up with an idea for a function and someone else says "yeah!" and goes and does it. Or, Joe or Jane User is reading the annotated manual at php.net and finds a bug in the description or a something obscure and system specific...and adds their two cents instantaneously and for the betterment of us all. You can do that, too. Try it, it's fun! - Julie +------------------------------------------------+ | Julie Meloni | | Tech. Director, i2i Interactive (www.i2ii.com) | | e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | | | "PHP Essentials" ... http://www.thickbook.com/ | +------------------------------------------------+ _______________________________________________ techtalk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/techtalk
