This book has been a rather long time in the making. I have been using PHP for many years now, and have grown to love it more and more for its simplistic approach to programming, its flexibility, and its power. Of all the programming languages I have used throughout my over 20-year career, PHP is my favorite, hands down. PHP has grown from a small set of functions to a very large volume of func…
Computers don’t naturally understand human languages such as English. Instead, we invent artificial languages to communicate with them. These artificial languages are typically much simpler than any human language, so it’s easier to learn them than for, say, an English speaker to learn Chinese. But it’s still hard work. As with any language, you’ll need to learn the spelling, punctuat…
This book is about writing real-world applications for the Android platform primarily using the Python language and a little bit of JavaScript. While there is nothing wrong with Java, it really is overkill when all you need to do is turn on or off a handful of settings on your Android device. The Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A) project was started to meet that specific need. This book will i…
This book is about HTML5 Programming. Before you can understand HTML5 programming, however, you need to take a step back and understand what HTML5 is, a bit of the history behind it, and the differences between HTML 4 and HTML5. In this chapter, we get right to the practical questions to which everyone wants answers. Why HTML5, and why all the excitement just now? What are the new design princi…
It’s been a while since I last revised this material and even longer than that since the first edition was published. In that time the technologies that Java programmers use have changed quite a bit and there’s no doubt that if I were writing this book for the first time I would do some things differently. For example, I’d place more of an emphasis on technologies related to web developme…
Before we begin our exploration of how to get the most out of JavaScript using the powerful MooTools framework, let’s focus a little on JavaScript and MooTools individually. We’ll also talk about the JavaScript developer’s toolkit, and what you need to develop applications in JavaScript.
W elcome to yet another book on the great programming language of PHP. This book is unique in that it focuses on higher-end materials and more advanced, cutting-edge topics. We have kept it as modern as possible with the fast-paced world of the Internet. We take the reader from an intermediate level to a more advanced level of this great programming language.
My first experience with a computer was at the age of 15 at a technical high school in the Netherlands where I was introduced to the Sinclair ZX-81. It was a little computer with only 16 KB of memory, but it was amazing and I started programming on it from day one. In 1981 when the hardware and software revolution started, I moved on to an Exidy Sourcer and the Commodore 64, soon followed by my…
Professional Oracle Programming is intended for application developers who use Oracle as their database. As such, this book does not devote much space to topics which are primarily of interest to database administrators, such as backup and recovery. Most importantly, this book is designed to help a programmer understand the database issues that can have a direct impact on the operation and perf…
ArcGIS is an industry-standard geographic information system from ESRI. This book will show you how to use the Python programming language to create geoprocessing scripts, tools, and shortcuts for the ArcGIS Desktop environment. This book will make you a more effective and efficient GIS professional, by showing you how to use the Python programming language with ArcGIS Desktop to automate geopr…
The web application landscape is vast and varied. Microsoft’s ASP.NET Framework— built on top of the mature and robust .NET Framework—is one of the most trusted platforms in the industry. ASP.NET MVC is Microsoft’s latest addition to the world of ASP.NET providing web developers with an alternative development approach that helps you build web applications with ease. The main goal of th…
Developing Drupal code has always been interesting and fun because the APIs change a lot between Drupal releases. Other CMS platforms have adopted a more static API approach, resulting in a much slower innovations. One such Drupal innovation has been the entity paradigm that simplified data manipulation. This enabled developers to build more powerful solutions and liberate their brains to remem…
From the early days of the Internet’s mainstream breakout, the major search engines and ecommerce companies wrestled with ever-growing quantities of data. More recently, social networking sites experienced the same problem. Today, many organizations realize that the data they gather is a valuable resource for understanding their customers, the performance of their business in the marketplace,…
Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Laboratories pioneered the C programming language in the early 1970s. However, this programming language did not begin to gain widespread popularity and support until the late 1970s. This was because, until that time, C compilers were not readily available for commercial use outside of Bell Laboratories. Initially, this growth in popularity was also partly spurred by…