About the book

The tag line of the book “Create a powerful and dynamic social networking website in PHP by building a flexible framework” sums up pretty well the main aims of the book. It starts off by giving an introduction to social networks: the definitions, existing services and software-solutions as well as why and when you might want to develop your own (Chapter 1).

Assuming you need your own solution it then goes on with planning and designing the framework which will serve as the platform for the further development of your social network site (Chapter 2). The next chapters (Chapter 3 through 10) goes systematically through how to implement features such as registration, relationships, status stream, events, groups, API etc.

It then finishes off with discussions around deployment, security and maintenance (Chapter 12), marketing and monetizing (Chapter 13) and finally a chapter about performance – Chapter 14: Planning for growth.

My thoughts

The short version: I like the book. It’s a recommended read for people wanting to learn more about extensible application frameworks suited for the web as well as examples of developing and implementing social features.

The slightly longer version: I like the fact that Michael (Peacock, I do not speak about my self in third person… usually) follows a systematic approach the whole way through and focuses on well known best practices. These includes data sanitation, MVC, design patterns and encourages the reader to  just use the exapmles as inspiration and a starting point.

I would like the chapter about performance (Chapter 14: Planning for growth) to be a little more comprehensive though, but it’s really more suited for several books of it own and Michael does give a nice overview of some of the options and techniques available which in turn can point the reader in possible directions for further reading.

The nitpicking: The editors should also have done a better job with the typography related to the code examples as they can be a little hard to read sometimes with lot’s of linewraps etc, as well as some minor typos which sometimes can cause a little confusion.

The HTML-purist in me do feel a little bad about some of the HTML/CSS-examples though, but that’s not the focus of the book.

Who it’s for

The author assumes the reader knows the basics of PHP 5, OOP and preferably some knowledge regarding software design patterns but that’s not required.

Sidenote: The techniques listed in this book is not limited to social networks so there are a lot of good information here about how to develop a framework in general. The “Social”-bit is just for the buzz

Useful information

Title: PHP 5 Social Networking

Author: Michael Peacock

ISBN: 1849512388

ISBN: 13 : 978-1-849512-38-1

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I feel it’s important that there is a open discussion about the ups and downs between the “alternative” browsers as I would like to see the best browsers possible. Right now the main focus of the normal tech-savvy folks is to promote Firefox as the hero to break IE’s monopoly. It’s all great – but to get a truly widespread usage to the average computer-users as well as the power-users we have to offer an alternative with the least possible amount of compromises and with the best implemented features that ease ones days on the web. Right now Firefox is not doing that. Neither is Opera – but I think Opera is quite a bit ahead by now – and been so for a couple of years.

Firefox is not a bad choice – quite the opposite actually. It has done some great improvements during it’s lifetime, but in my case does still lack those features that makes me think: “That was clever, this will make my day a little easier”. Some of it’s extensions has – but I don’t like the way they rest on the extensions (and inevitably – the end-users) to do all the work.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Www

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• My look on the web

1. I’ve been into 5 sports, none of which I practice today
2. I’ve lived in 6 places
3. I love beer
4. I’m sitting in (nothing but) my boxer as of writing this post
5. I feel partly disabled right now (no offence regarding those who really are ) after a snowboard-incident as of the other day
6. I dream of doing concerts
7. I want a Indian Chief

Here are some rules that must be followed by anyone who decide to follow up:

* Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some wierd.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

As I don’t know of anyone who’s not tagget yet, I’ll just leave seven blanko-lines. So feel free to interpret it as your name

I tag:

1. Mr. ____________
2. Ms. ____________
3. Ms. ____________
4. Mr. ____________
5. Mr. ____________
6. Mrs. ____________
7. Mr. ____________

Enjoy!

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There are surely a lack of good content in Norwegian, but I – as well as most others, I’d guess – would like my posts to be accessible to the largest possible amount of people interested in the subjects I’ll write about. And as I don’t write (or speek) Mandarin, I suppose English is the natural choice for me.

If I manage to live up to my ambitions regarding writing, I’ll probably create a separate Norwegian-section of this site, but for now it’ll do with English.

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This is going to be my little playground to write about any random problem, solution, or great ideas I’d eventually come over.

As my interests are web development, guitar-playing, and music in general – and as I’m also a student again –  that’s probably the subjects to expect here

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