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In today’s web development scenario, it is very necessary for a web developer to know how to code in PHP. PHP has become a major language in web development industry in last few years. From WordPress to FaceBook everything is coded in PHP language.
Recently we came to a book named PHP for Absolute Beginners which is a must read for beginners. Today we are going to review the book and guess what? We have 2 free copies of book to give you free of cost. I wish that it would have been there when I was learning PHP. Anyways After buying the book, I read it and the book was something more than awesome.
The book is written by Jason Lengstorf who is a self taught PHP developer. He is an experienced voice in PHP and web development. If you are a regular reader of some famous blogs like Smashing Magazine and CSS-Tricks then you might came to tutorials written by him. He is also co-author of the famous CSS-Tricks series “Creating a web app from scratch”. You can read his extensive interview by me here.
Jason starts the book with how to install PHP on your computer and then leads you throughout the way to building up your own blog system with user comments. Rather than wasting the first chapter on the history of programming and PHP, how it came and other theoretical stuff, he tells the readers how to install xampp on your local computer for better development. I have read about 5-6 books on PHP and it was my habit to skip the first chapter of book, first time I read the starting chapter of book.
The book is an example of a phrase, less theory, more coding. Jason teaches PHP with a lot of sample tutorials and examples. You will not read chapters and chapters of theory but you will learn best practices to do in the coding, and many pro tips which should be kept in mind when coding in PHP.
We have got two copies of PHP for absolute beginners for the giveaway. We are very thankful to Jason Lengstorf and the publishers of book APRESS Publishers for supporting this giveaway.
Pretty simple, you have to leave a comment on the post and tell us what you want to see on 1stwebdesigner, or how we can make the website better. We will use random.org to pick the winners. The giveaway is open till 11:59pm GMT+5, February 18th 2010.
If you don’t like waiting for the result of giveaway, you can buy the book here through Amazon.com service. What we can assure you that this book is definitely worth your money.
Good Luck!
*Update by Dainis Graveris
Seeing all those amazing suggestions and comments changed my mind about randomized pick! We will choose winners with the most thoughtful, interesting and best answer! I just love to see how you drop down all the weak points of 1stwebdesigner site! I love you for that, and I am definitely thinking about new design, which will be very well researched and carefully put together to fix all problems, usability bugs we have here!
Give us more feedback! Completely inspired!
Update
The Giveaway is closed now.
Winners are Terri Lockerridge and Mark Anderson.
Thanks for your feedback and suggestions.
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Saad Bassi is a 20 years old web developer from Pakistan who loves to create beautiful websites with great user experience. He is co-editor at CrispyTech and 1stWebDesigner and blogs about the next Windows at Windows8Geek. He also loves to make new friends so don't forget to say him a hello on Twitter. Last but not least, make sure that you check out my latest project, Addictive Fonts which focuses on free high quality font downloads.
Thursday, October 13th, 2011 20:59
Hi, I would love to see more ideas and examples of applications that can be created with Ruby on Rails. Also, anything to do with mobile programming.
Monday, June 20th, 2011 16:16
jQuery is one of at least a dozen JavaScript frameworks that have exploded onto the scene during the last few years, and for good reason. The Web 2.0 era has called upon JavaScript in a big way, turning to it as the driving force behind all the gliz and glamour that defines any Web 2.0 site. This huge increase in workload for JavaScript has called out for JavaScript frameworks that do the heavy lifting of common Web 2.0 tasks for us, from common visual effects such as fading, DOM traversal/ manipulation, to of course, Ajax interaction.
Monday, February 22nd, 2010 02:05
Saad, What a surprise, I won something! Thanks very much for the e-book! I’ll be reading away over the next little while. I have been wanting this book for a while.
Thanks again!
Mark
Monday, February 22nd, 2010 10:13
Congrats Mark. There are a lot of books coming soon. Stay tuned with us. Best of luck for the future.:)
Saturday, February 20th, 2010 08:33
Thanks a lot Terri. Much appreciated. I hope that the book will help you in get started with PHP. Jason is also writing another book, Pro PHP and jQuery. We are sure that we will also have some copies of book to giveaway.
Friday, February 19th, 2010 10:54
Nice one, at the moment i try to learn more about PHP, this book is a must have for me to learn more.
Thanks for this giveaway
Friday, February 19th, 2010 17:04
Excellent book! Glad to participate :) I think it would be a great idea to focus on jquery/css tutorials for beginners in the future
Thursday, February 18th, 2010 21:27
I’d love to see more in-depth tutorials for beginners, preferably with clear coding examples.
And I’d love to get the book :).
Thursday, February 18th, 2010 20:08
From the beginning itself i love 1stwebdesigner, u done a good job, keep up the good job,…
And random.org, pick my number :P
i want that book :(
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entis
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 17:14
How to make 1stWebDesigner better? Hm… that’s a hard question. You cover a very wide variety of topics. Maybe you could write one kind of articles that I don’t remember seeing on 1stWD – case studies. If well written, they can be very educational :)
Dainis Graveris
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 18:10
Hey, Entis!
You mean like going step by step to some problems we got, designing process, searching advertisers, creating contests -showing a little bit what’s happening behind the scenes?
Aaron
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 01:57
I think one direction you may think of going is to discuss the best ways to build a complicated site (such as dealing with slicing of images, image sizes, layout of information, margin issues, specialized menus, etc.) Thanks for all the hard work!
New York Web Designer
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 18:11
Me, me, me, pick me!
Awesome! Thanks for the great giveaway.
mirinel
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 03:10
Hello Saad Bassi! I would like to see more WordPress related articles on 1stwebdesigner (hackes, themes, tutorials etc). Hope that brings me a win.
Pi
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 19:41
I’ve been following this site for a month or so, and I absolutely love it.
I would like to see an overview of must-read blogs and more topics about fonts and typography (although you are doing great at the moment in that field).
Pi
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 19:45
Excuse me for the double post (I can’t edit my comments?), but I forget one important thing. It kind of annoys me that I can only click part of the logo to get back to your homepage. So maybe there is some room for improvement there..
Saad Bassi
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 20:48
You can also click breadcrumb navigation to go back to home.:)
Nicole Foster
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 01:40
I really hope I can win this because I have been trying to learn PHP so I can create useful web applications and WordPress (I can learn that from a different book though). I have had a hard time because there are few to no tutorials about web applications and the ones about them are not very detailed for beginners.
Margie Jordan
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 01:11
Possibly more HTML articles and maybe some interesting web design case studies.
Abdelhadi Touil
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 22:31
Thanks for this very important giveaway. I’d like to to see tutorials about CSS3, HTML5, CSS tips, WordPress and jQuery tips.
Thank you very much.
Adam
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 22:33
I would like to see information (tools, techniques, etc.) on helping basic web designers get to the next level. Also, some time management info for us folks who do web design on the side. Thanks!
Ric
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 23:20
I’d like to know a little more about web programming, move towards development from my actual porfession as a designer, anything that can help during the transition would be appreciated.
Kyle
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 23:49
I would like to see more CSS3 and html5 since they are on the up and coming! WordPress is huge too so articles on that is much appreciated
Thanks!
Patrick
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 20:25
Just started reading yesterday, loved the post and added you to my reader… I’d love a free book for My 2 days of loyalty…. you would have me for at least 2 weeks them… maybe my whole life…. unless this book is horrible… than maybe not.