Recent content on Larry Ullman
I started posting on this blog around 2007. At that time I was midway through the first decade working for myself, attempting to create a viable business. That entailed: Writing technical books, mostly about programming, databases, and web development Actually doing those things so I knew what I was writing about Teaching those things Speaking at conferences about those things Trying to…
As of January 2025, “The Yii Book” is no longer maintained or commercially available. “The Yii Book” is now open source and can be downloaded from its GitHub repo . My sincerest thanks to everyone that supported the book over the years, and to the Yii community at large. I hope that open sourcing this work creates additional benefits from the years of work that went into…
It took forever, but the fifth and final update for version 2 of the Yii framework has been posted. This brings the book to version 2.0. After a lifetime and half, and probably beyond when it’s of much use to anyone, the book is officially complete. It took forever, and then another few years. It was just a ton of work and my life changed in ways that made having dedicated time to work on…
PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide (5th Edition) Downloads Table of Contents Errata Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of myself, the technical editor, the copy editor, the line editor, the proofreader, and despite the multiple revisions, errors still occur. This page lists all the errors found in the book since it went to print. Note: errors are corrected in…
[PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide (5th Edition)](/books/php-and-mysql-for-dynamic-web-sites-visual-quickpro-guide-5th-edition/) Downloads Table of Contents Errata Introduction Chapter 1: Introduction to PHP Basic Syntax Sending Data to the Web Browser Writing Comments What Are Variables? Introducing Strings Concatenating Strings Introducing Numbers Introducing Constants…
PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide (5th Edition) Downloads Table of Contents Errata Welcome to the companion Web site for the fifth edition of the book PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide , written by Larry Ullman and published by Peachpit Press. This page is specifically for the book’s fifth edition , published in November 2017 (ISBN…
Oh man… So before I get to the good news (another update to “The Yii Book”), I should answer the million-dollar question of “Why in the #$&*$%&(&% is it taking so long to finish this book?!?!” I’ll start by saying that, in general, self-publishing is a ton of work, as I have to do everything myself. Which seems obvious and yet… Second, the switch from…
I just posted the third update of the second edition of “ The Yii Book “. This update brings this edition of the book to 365 pages, with two more revised chapters, getting to a total of 14, and completing Part II of the book. (I’m a little bit farther along than that, but thought Part II a logical place to do this release.)
I’m about to go offline for a couple of days (for personal reasons) and was hoping to get an update out beforehand, but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen. (And, as is the way with such things, if you try to do something computer-y when you have no time to deal with any complications, that’s exactly when the complications happen.) In any case, apologies–as…
[PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide (5th Edition)](/books/php-for-the-web-visual-quickstart-guide-5th-edition/) Downloads Table of Contents Errata Introduction What is PHP? Why Use PHP? How PHP Works What You’ll Need About This Book Companion WebSite Chapter 1: Getting Started With PHP Basic HTML Syntax Basic PHP Syntax Using SFTP Testing Your Script Sending Text to the Browser Using…
[PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide (5th Edition)](/books/php-for-the-web-visual-quickstart-guide-5th-edition/) Downloads Table of Contents Errata Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of myself, the technical editor, the copy editor, the line editor, the proofreader, and despite the multiple revisions, errors still occur. This page lists all the errors found in the book since it went to…
[PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide (5th Edition)](/books/php-for-the-web-visual-quickstart-guide-5th-edition/) Downloads Table of Contents Errata Welcome to the companion Web pages for the fifth edition of the book PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide , written by Larry Ullman and published by Peachpit Press. This page is specifically for the book’s fifth edition , published in June…
After a four-month hiatus, my support forums are officially back online. I’m also working on getting through the backlog of “things I need to investigate and give a definitive answer to”. That will be a continued work in progress for some time. The forums are free for anyone to use, whether or not you’ve purchased a book (although supporting the books is the primary role of…
On Monday, November 2, 2015, I posted the second update of the second edition of " The Yii Book ". (I was hoping to blog about it here on Tuesday but…) This update brings the book to 307 pages, with four more revised chapters, bringing the total to 12. Specific release notes are:
I just posted the first update for the second edition of " The Yii Book ", covering version 2 of the Yii framework . The release notes are lengthy, but a couple of quick “I’m aware” thoughts up front… I’m not pleased with the image quality of some images, but that’s a harder problem to solve than you might imagine. I will continue to work on that. This update…
In this edition… About This Newsletter On the Web => Working Real Hours On the Blog => How to Screw Up Professionally What is Larry Thinking => The Pros and Cons of Freelancing Larry Ullman’s Book News => Four Revisions Coming in 2015 and 2016
For those of you interested in such things, here’s an update on my forthcoming books for 2015-2016 (spoiler alert: they’re all revisions of existing books).
My presentation to the Frederick Web Tech group, in Frederick, Maryland, originally scheduled for March 3, 2015, was postponed due to nasty weather. (At least from my side, that was a good decision, as all of central Pennsylvania got covered with two inches of ice.) I’m happy to say the presentation has been rescheduled for Tuesday, April 7, 2015 . The event is free, and if you’re in…
Hey, ho! Just a quick check-in to let you know where things stand on the second edition of " The Yii Book ", for version 2 of the Yii framework . Over the past month I’ve started sequentially going through the book to update it for the new Yii version. I’ve also set targets in my mind, with my own target deadline (not sharing, because then it’s just embarrassing when the deadline…
I’m going to be speaking to the Frederick Web Tech group, in Frederick, Maryland, on Tuesday, March 3, 2015 . The event is free, and if you’re in the greater Maryland-Washington, D.C.-Virginia-Pennsylvania-West Virginia-Delaware (why not?) area, I encourage you to come out. It’s going to be a cozy affair, with pizza and beer! The specific presentation I’m doing is…
In this edition… About This Newsletter What Were You Thinking? => Freelancing, Part 1 On the Web => Project Billing On the Blog => Putting Your Current Clients First (Duh) Q&A => How do you get clients? What is Larry Thinking => Rethinking How You Think About Clients Larry Ullman’s Book News => “The Yii Book” version 1 Complete!
About a week later than I would have liked, I’m happy to say that “The Yii Book” now has a new home at larry.pub . If you’re an existing customer, your existing account information should work there. If you have any problems at all, please let me know.
Why…Hello! I am very pleased, and elated, and relieved (mostly relieved) to say that the first edition (i.e., for Yii 1) of “The Yii Book” is finally, finally, finally! done. I posted it earlier today. I’m going to skip the obligatory–and deserved–“OMG I’m sorry it took so long” and get onto the “What’s next?”.
I was fairly slow to adopt Git (having been raised on other version control tools), but, needless to say and like most of us, it’s now a daily component of my work flow. And certainly using Git myself is a much different beast than using Git in a massive organization with hundreds of engineers all working from the same code base. Which is to say: there’s still plenty of room for my Git…
Chapters 22 and 23 of " The Yii Book " are example chapters, in which I don’t cover new material but rather put together previous material in a more complete context. These example chapters have been popular in my other books, so I thought I’d include two in this book. The specific examples I came up with are: A blog/CMS example An e-commerce site The blog (Chapter 22) is a more…
Without much formality (aside from the Shakespeare), I’d like to share four bits of Yii-related news: The Release of Yii 2 Progress on “The Yii Book” Looking ahead to “The Yii 2 Book” (aka, the second edition) An online Yii 2 presentation I’m doing this Thursday, October 23, 2014 for Nomad PHP
On October 23, I’ll be doing an online presentation titled “ Faster Web Development with Yii Framework 2 ”. In this presentation, I’ll be introducing the Yii framework in general, and version 2 in particular. Keep reading this post or click the “Faster Web Development with Yii Framework 2” link, for an introduction to the presentation. This is a paid event, put on by NomadPHP , but the…
In this edition… About This Newsletter On the Web => Faster Web Development with Yii Framework 2 On the Web => How to decide when to work for free On the Web => Success at Sales Q&A => When do you decide to freelance? What is Larry Thinking => Money Larry Ullman’s Book News => “The Yii Book” et al.
The first thing you’ll need to know to use JavaScript and jQuery in Yii is how to add JavaScript to a Web page. As with any standard Web page, there are two primary options: Link to an external file that contains the JavaScript code Place the JavaScript code directly in the page using SCRIPT tags Just as I assume you’re already comfortable with JavaScript, I’ll also assume you…
After way too long, I’ve finally posted version 0.9 of " The Yii Book ". This includes two of the hardest chapters to write: Chapter 20, “Working with Third-Party Libraries,” and Chapter 21, “Testing Your Application”. (See the current table of contents .)
In this edition… About This Newsletter Social Media Cooper Press Websec.io Chris Hartjes Kate Matsudaira’s Tech Leadership News Yii 2 Status and Looking Forward Larry Ullman’s Book News => “Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL (2nd Edition)”
In my php\[tek\] keynote, " How to Get There ", I make several references to books, cognitive psychology , TED talks , dead Austro-Hungarian writers , and 1980’s television dramas . For those interested in pursuing any of these (especially “L.A. Law”), and to give due credit to my influences, here are the things I named. (Separately, you can see the slides at SpeakerDeck . The…
My goal today is to finish the rough draft of the two presentations I’ll be giving at php\[tek\] in Chicago next week: How to Get There (keynote) Faster Web Development with Yii 2 (technical) In trying to finish up these presentations today–a full 10 and 11 days before I give each presentation (respectively), I’m reminded of the myriad benefits of finishing the presentations…
Approximately 1,000 years ago (or 5 months), I promised to give away copies of my " Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL (2nd Edition) " book to those people that have purchased " The Yii Book ". The only problem is I had to create the code to do that. Which I now have. And it may even work. If you’re interested in possibly winning a copy, log into your account . Then click the…
On Sunday night I posted Chapter 20, “Working with Third-Party Libraries,” of " The Yii Book ". The chapter is 39 pages long as a PDF, with the following contents: Installation Accessing Library Classes Working with Composer Using Symfony Using Swift Mailer Using Elasticsearch Most of the chapter covers Elasticsearch, creating the shell of a search engine. This rules out the need for…
As you may already know, the beta of Yii 2 was announced yesterday . Besides being another release, which is a good thing, officially reaching beta status means that no new major features will be added before Yii 2 is released. In other words, what Yii 2 looks like in beta will be pretty close to what Yii 2 is. Yay! Rather than discussing all, or the most important, changes in Yii 2, I’d…
I’m quite happy to say that I’ll be one of two keynote speakers at php\[tek\] 2014 ! The opening keynote is from Terry Chay , Director of Features Engineering for Wikimedia Foundation . He’ll be discussing the technology challenges faced by Wikipedia. On the second morning, I’ll relay an inspiring story about how to get where you want to be in your career, based upon my own…
I’m hard at work on Chapter 20, “Working with Third-Party Libraries,” of " The Yii Book ", and making decent progress. The goal of the chapter, really, is to explain how to include third-party libraries without getting a ton of errors about not being able to find the class definition. If you’ve played around in this area at all, then you’ll know what I’m talking…
HTML forms are one of the key pieces of any website. As is the case with many things, creating forms while using a framework such as Yii is significantly different than creating forms using standard HTML alone. In Chapter 9, “Working with Forms,” of " The Yii Book ", you’ll learn what you need to know to create HTML forms when using the Yii framework. You’ll comprehend the…
I generally don’t like to link to things that require that you sign in to access the content, but I thought this question and answer on Quora was worth sharing. The question is: " Why is it hard to scale a database, in layman’s terms? " To which Paul King put forth a useful and easy to understand answer .
\[tek\] is one of the best-regarded PHP conferences around, and this year you’ll again find an all-star line-up (plus me). The conference itself runs for 2.5 days, from May 21st to the 23rd, with one additional tutorial day and a training day (on the 20th and 19th, respectively).
On Friday evening, I officially released version 0.8 of “The Yii Book” (Chapter 19 had previously been released in rough format). This update includes over 55 pages of new content, which I call Chapter 19, “Extending Yii”. This is a 10% increase in the book’s total length, and by far the longest chapter in the book. You can download the latest version from the account…
As a reminder, this Thursday, January 30th, 2014, I’ll be presenting “Using, and Learning From, Stripe ”, at the online eCommerce Web Summit. This is one of several conferences put together by the awesome folks behind php\[architect\] . Mine is one of four presentations that are part of this online e-commerce conference: eCommerce Content Management – Patrick Schwisow Using, and…
On Wednesday, I sent out three emails about " The Yii Book ", the contents of which I’ll summarize here. But first, if you’re not receiving these emails but you’d like to, you can set that on your Yii account page . As for those emails, and this summarization, the tl;dr version is: A rough draft of Chapter 19, “Extending Yii,” is available for download on the account…
So…it was an unnecessarily rough migration, and a very frustrating Sunday, but I think the server migration is complete. I had to reimport 10 orders for “The Yii Book” (that happened on the old server). If anyone has any problems with “The Yii Book” site or their account, please let me know. I’ll open the forums back up momentarily. If anyone catches anything…
Starting tonight, Friday, January 10th, 2014, I’m going to pause some activity on my site for necessary maintenance. My hosting company, ServInt , will be migrating my VPS to a new server (big yay!). The migration will give me a much more current machine, with much more current software, including the latest version of PHP (big yay!). But during the migration, no new data can be added to the…
I wanted to wait on saying something until the chapter was on its way to the tech editors, but it’s the end of the year and the chapter is close enough to being done that I can offer an update now. My wife and kids went away to visit friends for a couple of days, and I stayed home to work, spending the vast majority of my time on " The Yii Book ". Not only did I make pretty good progress on…
On January 30th, 2014, I’ll be presenting " Using, and Learning From, Stripe ", at the online eCommerce Web Summit . This is one of several conferences put together by the awesome folks behind php\[architect\] . Mine is one of four presentations that are part of this online e-commerce conference: eCommerce Content Management – Patrick Schwisow Using, and Learning From, Stripe – Larry Ullman…
You may have noticed, and possibly found yourself quite frustrated by, the fact that I have not updated “The Yii Book” in quite some time. Once again (once again!) my sincerest apologies for the delay. I have not been as productive on “The Yii Book”, or as communicative, as of late as I would have liked, or as you certainly deserve. Though a lack of updates or information…
I just posted a couple of support pages for the 2nd edition of my “Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL” book. The main URL for the book is: http://www.larryullman.com/books/effortless-e-commerce-with-php-and-mysql-2nd-edition/