Zend Framework University

Cloud computing is no longer a buzz word, a hype that’s been shouted at many technical conferences. No, it has turned into a real business model many people make a living off. And in that perspective I started exploring the world of cloud computing about a year ago. I also teamed up with Microsoft to promote and explore their new Windows Azure platform and even co-organized a contest deploying PHP applications on the Microsoft cloud solution.

A couple of weeks ago, my dear friend Cal Evans asked me to review the book “PHP Development in the Cloud” written by “Ivo Jansch” and “Vito Chin”. I accepted as I was very interesting in exploring more of the cloudy world I just found myself in the middle of. Another reason was that both authors were fellow co-workers at Ibuildings back in the day. I promised this would be an objective review seen through the eyes of a developer just started exploring the mystifying world of cloud solutions.

The book
Let me say the book is a fun read. You can take it up to your bedroom as late-night read, read during lunch or even in the garden when the kids are playing about. It all evolves around an photo managing application that uses the power of the cloud to process uploaded images and manage them in a new distribute way. Both Ivo and Vito build up the story where they take one feature at the time and use one of the provided cloud platforms to facilitate or expand the application’s functionality.

They also explain in plain words the different cloud solutions that are being offered these days and throw terms at you like IaaS, PaaS and SaaS with a detailed description why you would choose this specific cloud architecture followed by code examples. And this little extra attention to detail is something I could really appreciate as I was exploring these architectures but couldn’t tie it to useful use cases why I should choose architecture A for this, but B for that. I’m glad Ivo and Vito cleared this fog for me.

At the end of the book you have a functional photo managing application that uses cloud solutions from different cloud suppliers, each with it’s specific usefulness. I think that working out the example code and playing with it was what I needed to get the clue as I’m more focussed on hacking code.

The good
Like I already explained in my introduction, this book is well written and the order of chapters make it very easy to expand functionality step-by-step. If you’re already familiar with cloud solutions, this book gives you some hands-on examples you can try out on different cloud platform architectures so you can decide which vendor provides the best solution for your needs.

I also enjoy seeing various references to other open-source tools that allow you to fine-tune and optimize your application, infrastructure or platform you want to run your application or feature on.

The bad
Although the book was well written and examples were clear and understandable, I found it hard to get some of the examples deployed on cloud solutions I haven’t played with before. Luckily the internet is a good resource finding solutions to issues that crosses your path in the book. But I do want to state a small warning that if you’re absolutely new to cloud development, the exercises in the book might frustrate you as you have to do additional searches to get it all working.

The ugly
Although this book is complete in describing all features of cloud architectures and solutions, I do miss a little disclaimer that indicates the examples are written by technology experts and require some knowledge on some of the implementations they use. Even for me some things I had to reread as I have no degree in Computer Science and some of the concepts were unknown to me. In my case, Google was my friendly teacher to bring me back up to speed.

Conclusion
If you’re doing PHP and you’re deploying apps on cloud technology, you’ll find this book very interesting as it gives you some specific usages for each of the cloud solution providers. If either PHP or cloud technology is new to you, I’d recommend to get up to speed first before you jump into the dark.

A couple of weeks ago I got a request from Packt Publishing to review the book “CMS Design Using PHP and JQuery“. I accepted the offer because we’re using more and more JQuery in our applications these days and I thought this book would give me a better insight in how to best use JQuery.

After receiving the book I started reading it. But right from the start the author displayed bad practices and mis-use of PHP. Reading the book from front to back, the author Kae Verens (@kae_verens) has confronted me with bad use of variables (like $a, $b, $c), bad use of PHP structures and a complete wrong approach of using JavaScript, where JavaScript should enrich an application instead of incorporating business logic.

The good:
It was nice to see JQuery has a variety of plugins to get things done, most of the plugins discussed in the book were developed by the author himself.
I do like the way Kae Verens (@kae_verens) breaks up a CMS basic functionality and targets it one by one to describe it’s functionality and purpose. Without the code samples, this book is a good guide for anyone who wants to build a home-grown CMS.

The bad:
It’s not bad, it’s worse!

The ugly:
As already stated in the introduction, this book is a complete contradiction to the things we try to promote. Clear separation of business logic and presentation layers (where JavaScript is another presentation layer) has gone out of the window in this book.

Since the audience for this book are beginner to intermediate PHP developers, I can only curse at the author to be more responsible. Never use meaningless variables like $a, $b, $c!!!

Filtering and Validation of received data was something I missed in the code.

Another thing, if you use SPL functions like DirectoryIterator to traverse a directory on your filesystem, use the SPL methods that come with it (e.g. $dir->isDot() to verify if it’s a “.” or “..”).

At the end of the book the author says this application only works on a *NIX platform. I think this statement reflects how this application is build: poor design.

Conclusion:
After reading this book, I should advice Packt Publishing to put a sticker on it “Warning: explicit content – bad coding practices” as this book is dangerous in the hands of novice PHP developers.

I’m very sorry for the authors and Packt Publishing as the topic of this book is very promising and could be a good read for everyone, but at this point with this type of coding I strongly advice people NOT to buy this book. Maybe a next edition…

About two months ago I purchased “The Agile Samurai” by Jonathan Rasmusson from Pragmatic Bookshelf after seeing his presentation “Agile in a nutshell“. I was already impressed by how he presented the agile scrum management cycle, as he gave already some good hints and tips on how to implement scrum management processes in ongoing projects.

But it was not until I read the book that I discovered Jonathan is a true expert in this field. With “The Agile Samurai” Jonathan explains in simple words the idea behind scrum, what steps to take in starting scrum management giving pointers on how to deal with developers, managers and customers and how to get everyone involved.

He also gives a lot of hints with his “Master Sensei and the aspiring warrior” where he summarizes each chapter with a dialogue between a student and his master. Throughout the book he also reflects on his own experiences describing a circumstance and how he personally turned a bad situation into a success story.

The book is filled with pretty graphics that not only describes a given situation with one image, but also challenges the reader in thinking further ahead. Since agile processes aren’t new, Jonathan refers in his book a lot to other books that go deeper on a given topic Jonathan only touches briefly.

Besides going into detail on managing projects, he also describes topics like “technical depth” (a topic very well explained by Elizabeth Naramore at several PHP conferences), test driven development and continuous integration.

All in all, a must read for anyone who’s already familiar with scrum project management processes and want to learn tricks how to get management and customers along for the agile ride. But it’s an excellent guide for people who want to start managing projects in an agile way. No matter if you’re a developer, a lead developer, a manager or a customer… this book is the best reference for optimizing the way a project can be turned into a success story or dropped before too much time, money and resources are spilled. Become The Agile Samurai.