I must confess that Jono Bacon actually caught me by surprise. While I was following the creation process of the book (O’Reilly invited UG leaders to send feedback) I could have never imagined I would one day have something so useful for someone who deals with communities on a day to day basis. In this universe Jono is a well known figure, with vast experience in managing and participating in online communities, which credits him as a perfect candidate to write a book like this one.

A book about how to manage and live amongst virtual communities has all the elements to be a boring book full of “do’s and don’t’s”, in summary a very repetitive and unpleasant book. However Jono proves his understanding of the communication channels (important part of any community) right off the bat in the book’s introduction. Here he showcases his writing strategy, telling personal experiences. Building on top of this premise the author goes throughout the book presenting us with new concepts or strategies and following it up with a real life example from his and others’ experience in communities. This makes the book a delightful read, easy and flowing, the kind of book you can pickup anywhere and have fun while you plow through the pages, perfect for the everyday life of lines and waiting. I recommend loading it up on your e-reader if you got one.

The book is incredibly broad and valid for numerous roles inside every community, from managers to members, volunteers, to the regular Open Source developer. Each level of the community stands to gain from this book and even people who work with or use the community, such as marketing people, and activists who need to learn how to communicate and win-over the communities. Each chapter dives into a different and fundamental aspect, like communication, building buzz, measuring, events and handling conflicts.

Anyone who has ever managed a community and looks at this table of contents will surely have a few flashbacks of various moments in their experience, I know I for one identified myself in quite a few situations, from my motivation to participate in the PHP community to the conflicts and the experience of contributing to Open Source. I usually like to give more details of each chapter when I do reviews like this one, but in this case that feels like I would be cheating the reader from the amazing experience of having Jono lead you through his experiences and concepts, so i’ll not do it.

In summary, if you have any involvement with virtual communities, be it as a manager, member or just someone who interacts with them, this book should have its place in your shelf. Buy it, read it, enjoy it an have fun while you learn to take your community to the next level.

The Art of Community
Author: Jono Bacon
ISBN: 978-0-596-15671-8
Pages: 400
Year: 2009
Publisher: O’Reilly
On O’Reilly | On Amazon

The book covers a lot of ground, even though it looks rather thin. Derick does a wonderful job of introducing date/time matter in the opening chapter, covering all the calendar switches (Julian to Gregorian) and its complexities (did you know Feb 30th has already happened once?) as well as timezones, solar times and details of daylight-saving time. This is all invaluable information for anyone working with dates.

The remaining chapters delve into the various operations we use with and around date and time, like parsing, representing and manipulating date and time values. It directs attention to various features of the PHP functions that handles timezones and daylight savings. Its also very interesting that the book fully covers and makes crystal clear the new features in PHP 5.3 that pertains to this topic.

The book explores PHP internals and describes how to use timezones and to update the internal timezone database, as well as how to deal with database engines and still get back correctly timezoned dates.

Guide to Date and Time Programming is a really pleasant read. In a very orderly fashion Derick covers all the steps before introducing new issues, instead of just raising issues without fully explaining what they are about. The book functions very well as reference book, since documentation on this topic is not all it should be in the PHP Manual. This is a must-read book for anyone that has ever had to deal with handling date or time in a PHP system, or anyone who plans on launching systems that are aware of timezone differences.

php/architect’s Guide to Date and Time Programming

by Derick Rethans

Paperback: 152 pages

Publisher: Marco Tabini & Associates, Inc. (April 20, 2009)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0981034500

ISBN-13: 978-0981034508

Available from Amazon

Even though it was published in 2005, the issues that “Essential PHP Security” addresses is still very relevant today. Written by Chris Shiflett, the book goes through various security aspects associated with a PHP application, and for that reason its content can be considered up to date and applicable to various day-to- day situations faced by developers.

The book has a very easy going approach to exposing the various aspects of security it addresses. These aspects are very clearly exposed and separated into differenct chapters, covering everything from forms to includes and security in shared hosting environments. Each topic is analyzed in detail and internally divided into exploits and attack strategies for that security flaw. In this way the book becomes an easy to access reference book where its possible to go directly to the chapter that addresses the specific aspect you are coding for right now and allowing you to know which flaws to look out for. The introductory chapter presents Principles and Practice of Security which can be applied in any application and any language, for example “Defense in Depth”, which demonstrates the fact that security is much bigger than merely analyzing specific points of you application.

Even thought is has been published a few years ago, the book addresses topics like XSS that play a important role in the AJAX driven web we observe nowadays. Old friends like Session Hijacking and SQL Injection are analyzed from various points of view, aligned to the various segments of an application. This structure makes for a very light and enjoyable reading experience which can easily be fit into a few spare moments, or even in the waiting room of the occasional visit to the doctor’s office (it worked for me anyway).

This book deserves to be part of any developer’s bookshelf, at least to serve as a reminder and inspiration for reflection, even in a world where more and more Frameworks internalize all aspects of security – but as I always say, we developers should always know what is going on behind the curtains.

Essential PHP Security A Guide to Building Secure Web Applications

By Chris Shiflett
October 2005
Pages: 124
ISBN 10: 0-596-00656-X | ISBN 13: 9780596006563

You can buy the book from Amazon