Lacisoft's » books

Book: Drupal 6 Performance Tips

lacisoft — Thu, 06 May 2010 06:14:27 +0000

Recently i received another Packt Publishing book, this time with Drupal as the subject. The title of the book is Drupal 6 Performance Tips and i found it to be a very good and helpful companion anytime you need to fine-tune a Drupal installation for heavy traffic sites.

The book is written by Trevor James and TJ Holowaychuk, both of the authors being experienced web developers with quite a few projects behind. Drupal 6 Performance Tips is structured into 9 chapters, each dealing with a specific task of optimization or enhancement.

The first chapter is dedicated to the process of upgrading Drupal, most importantly the book deals with upgrading Drupal from versions 5.x, a subject that is quite interesting to many of you.

The second chapter deals with the maintaining of your Drupal site. From caching to cron and from cleaning up files to tweaking .htaccess you can find many useful tips in this chapter.

Speaking of useful tips, in the third chapter developers can get quite a few tips on using development modules and tools. This is a must read for every beginner developer but experienced developers can learn a few things too.

Chapters 4,5 and 6 have performance in focus. The authors offer performance optimization advices and teach you how to use the DB Maintenance module, the Throttle module, the Boost module and the Advanced Boost module.

The seventh chapter is especially interesting as it deals with using Memcache API and integration. This is an exhaustive guide that deals with everything, from installing Memcached libraries and service to more advanced subjects such as running memcache without saving cache to the database.

Chapter 8 is for tips on Advanced Caching techniques, this chapter deals with Authenticated User Page Caching (Authcache) among other things, so it is very handy when you have quite a lot of pages that needs to be served to authenticated users.

The last chapter, chapter 9 is dedicated to Drupal Multisite configuration and performance. How to set up multiple websites on the same Drupal installation is explained in a detailed manner and also examples are presented.

Without doubt this book is a must have for people who are working on high traffic websites and who care about the performance of their site. And everyone should care about the performance of the site because bad performance can not only hurt you financially (more servers needed) but can drive away your visitors and Google’s bots (yes, recently Google announced that site speed is a factor in ranking of the websites).

Book: Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x

lacisoft — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 06:04:50 +0000

Packt Publishing recently published a new Drupal book for e-commerce. As the title suggests - Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x – the book helps unexperienced developers to create and administer an online shop based on Drupal and a Ubercart 2.x module. The book was written by George Papadongonas and Yiannis Doxaras.

The book is quite comprehensive and deals with every aspect of the development of an online shop. From installing Drupal and Ubercart to managing orders, customizing the frontend and user interface. Also at the end of the book there is a chapter about various internet marketing techniques and also a short presentation of some Search Engine Optimization practices.

Among some of the interesting topics i noticed:

a detailed explanation of how to transform any template or design to an Ubercart theme
you can learn how to create shipping quotes and connect your store with transport companies, like UPS or the United States Postal Service.
you can learn how to create reports with sales
you can learn how to integrate a large number of payment gateways
integration with CiviCRM is explained
tips on how to promote your products on social networks
cross selling and recommendation systems

So, those who want to get in the business of creating online shops, should read this book!

New TYPO3 book on the block

lacisoft — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:14:55 +0000

I’ve learned today about a new TYPO3 book – the TYPO3 4.3 Multimedia Cookbook written by Dan Osipov and published by Packt Publishing. They were kind enough to provide me a free copy for review. I will be receiving a copy in short time and will publish an extensive review of this book. I just wanted to mention it before my review so those who don’t make buying decisions based on reviews or don’t need a review to buy this book can order it asap.

3 books for Typo3 developers

lacisoft — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:11:20 +0000

If you work building websites with Typo3 CMS you often run into problems and the documentation on the Typo3 website is really badly structured. When i first started to learn Typo3 it was hard, but after a while i got used to it. But i wish i had the 3 books i will present to you. With them i could have learned Typo3 much faster. But nevertheless it is very helpful even now in some situations. So i invite you to discover Typo3 with these 3 great books

Building Websites with Typo3
Written by: Michael Peacock
Published by Packt Publishing, 2007

you can order it here

Typo3 Extension Development
Author: Dmitry Dulepov
Published by Packt Publishing, 2008

you can order it here

Mastering Typoscript: Typo3 Website, Template and Extension developement
Author: Daniel Koch
Published by Packt Publishing, 2006

you can order it here

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3 books for building revolutionary web applications

lacisoft — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 10:14:46 +0000

So i read again. That is not news. But i wanted to share with you what i read lately. Below you can find 3 very good books that can help you if you want to build scalable and revolutionary web applications. Maybe you know some of them, maybe not, but here they are anyway:

Building Scalable Web Sites by Cal Henderson (published by O’Reilly) Amazon link
High Performance MySQL by Jeremy Zawodny and Derek J. Balling (publised by O’Reilly) Amazon link
Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran (published by O’Reilly) Amazon link

6 books for developers working with Drupal 6 and Jquery

lacisoft — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:22:11 +0000

Lately i was working on a new project using Drupal 6 and jQuery. Drupal is entirely new for me, although i was aware of its success i never used it in a project. So i had to learn the quirks of this CMS from somewhere. And after digging through the online libraries i’ve found 3 great books that helped me alot understanding and learning about Drupal. These 3 books are:

Pro Drupal Development – Second edition by John K. VanDyk , published by Apress, 2008
Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6, by David Mercer, published by Packt Publishing, March 2008
Learning Drupal 6 module developement, by Matt Butcher, published by Packt Publishing, May 2008

So this was the first part of the task. I also needed to learn jQuery quickly. The website i am working on its full of Ajax and all kinds of effects like drag and drop and so on. So for learning quickly jQuery you should read:

jQuery in Action – by Bear Bibault and Yehuda Katz, published by Manning, 2008
jQuery Reference Guide – by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg, published by Packt Publishing, August 2007
Learning jQuery – by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg, published by Packt Publishing, June 2007

These books helped me alot, but if you want to learn you also need to read documentation on the website of these wonderful projects Drupal.org and jQuery.com