Amazon.com: How to Cheat in Flash CS3: The art of design and animation in Adobe Flash CS3: Books: Chris Georgenes

He’s at it again. Flash master Chris Georgenes has finished his book on how to master flash animation. Chris is a Adobe Community Expert and is a speaker at many events teaching tips tricks and secrets on how to be a better flash animator.

You can order Chris’s book from Amazon or from any from any good book store that knows a great book when they see one.

Also if your love flash, pop into Chris’s Flash forum at www.keyframer.com/forum where you’ll find Chris chatting with many of his fans and occassionly see me moderating the forums there, or you can visit Chris’s portfolio site at www.mudbubble.com, and visit the books How to Cheat in Flash Book Website.

 This was a previous post updated to include the books recently launched website.

Rails Deployment by Pragmatic Programmers

Well it’s about time that someone is going to put together some information on rails deployment. I personally have had my own stories to tell of hours of uncertainty and issues deploying a rails app to a productions server.

One problem for many new programmers both to programming in general and to rails is that rails doesn’t deploy as easily as using ftp to upload your files to your production server like PHP or HTML. If your really new to development you’ll also be totally confused with subversion a version control system for your applications files and then which web host supporting rails and then how to deploy on their particular system.

Yes it is and can be at time extremely frustrating especially if your a solo developer with limited resources for support other than forums, irc chats etc but even then it’s pretty difficult trying to explain your problems on forums with something so complicated.

Well there is finally a light at the end of the dark dim tunnel of deployment with the gurus from pragmatic programmers soon to release a book on Rails Deployment. I’ve read numerous books on rails and generally deployment is only a small part chapter not really enabling beginners like myself to deploy successfully. Only as of a couple of days ago I finally deployed a basic application over to textdrive after numerous attempts at trying to set up Rails on a dedicated server with MT. Even now I’m still not sure how to continue so I’ll need to do plenty of reading, trial and error, and no doubt mistakes before I finally and comfortable deploying a rails app.

So all I can say to the Pragmatic Programmers is hurry up and bring this book on because I have some money I’m more than willing to swap for the book and I’m sure I won’t be the only one.

technorati tags:deployment

Blogged with Flock

I haven’t read the entire book yet, in fact I’ve only read about seventy odd pages however, so far I am really happy with how the book is written and how much I’ve already picked up along the way. A quick flip through the pages and I can’t help getting excited about developing new skills in dynamic database development using the very impressive Ruby on Rails framework.

I’m not a experienced developer by any means but I have had considerable exposure to PHP and Flash Action scripting so I get the overall programming methodology, and all I can say is that I am extremely impressed with my experience with Rails so far.

Once you get used to the Rails framework and how it fits together, learn some basic Ruby so you can understand the syntax, and do a few hands on tutorials, you find that it all starts coming together and the more it does, the more excited you get.

Simple things like creating forms, and adding information to your database, and data validation are a breeze in Rails compared with my experience in doing the same thing in PHP, and quite frankly once you experience Rails, I doubt you’ll ever want to go back!

This book is for beginners and experts in programming however I recommend that you have some understanding of programming so you follow along much easier. If you don’t have any coding experience then you might want to start learning Ruby as your first language by getting the book Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas which I’ve added to my collection also.

With this book you get to build a real online store application and you’ll be adding data to your database in no-time, in fact you’ll be doing it so soon that it’s mind boggling. Other areas included in the book are learning about Rails conventions, Rails generators, adding AJAX, REST, web services, adding email functionality, securing your application, testing and deployment.

This book has also been extensively beta tested by hundreds of developers from varying skill levels who provided valuable feedback to the author before going to print so it’s been very rigorously tested. If the success of the first edition is an indication of how good this edition will be, then you’d have no choice by to buy it if you want to start developing using Ruby on Rails.

Recently I purchased Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke. Andy has been involved in web design for over ten years, runs his own design studio and contributes in many web standards workshops and conferences all around the world.

Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke

I really think Andy has created a excellent book which is very motivating and inspirational. This book is really well presented with beautiful images inspiring your design thoughts, challenges you to create cutting edge CSS layouts with accessibility and degrading gracefully with older browsers with less CSS support, challenges you not to use hacks and filters in your CSS code providing practical alternatives, and creates an enthusiasm to create better websites than you have ever done before regardless of your skill level.

You will also learn to truly separate visual design from layout and use the power of CSS to create rich semantically structured design that conforms to web standards. Transcending CSS gives you practical processes to streamline your design time and implement time saving techniques developed by professionals in the industry in a real studio environment.

Not really a book for beginners who are still working with table layouts or wanting to learn CSS, but those who have some basic knowledge of CSS and have designed websites, or for advanced CSS users who want to set higher standards in their work.

If your passionate about CSS then you can’t go past this book. I already have a few books on CSS in my bookshelf and this is my pick of the bunch to date.

Edit: As of the 1st of January 2007 this book was listed as No 6 on Amazon’s bestselling book about Scripting and Programming.