New books: Web applications, PHP, JavaScript
How do you create a mission-critical site that provides exceptional performance while remaining flexible, adaptable, and reliable 24/7?
Written by the manager of a UI group at Yahoo!, Developing Large Web Applications offers practical steps for building rock-solid applications that remain effective even as you add features, functions, and users. You’ll learn how to develop large web applications with the extreme precision required for other types of software.
- Avoid common coding and maintenance headaches as small websites add more pages, more code, and more programmers
- Get comprehensive solutions for refining HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and Ajax for large-scale web applications
- Make changes in one place that ripple through all affected page elements
- Embrace the virtues of modularity, encapsulation, abstraction, and loosely coupled components
- Use tried-and-true techniques for managing data exchange, including working with forms and cookies
- Learn often-overlooked best practices in code management and software engineering
- Prepare your code to make performance enhancements and testing easier.
Get past all the hype about PHP and dig into the real power of this language. PHP: The Good Parts explores the most useful features of PHP and how they can speed up the web development process, and explains why the most commonly used PHP elements are often misused or misapplied. You’ll learn which parts add strength to object-oriented programming, and how to use certain features to integrate your application with databases.
Written by a longtime member of the PHP community, this is ideal for new PHP programmers, as well as web developers switching from other languages.
- Become familiar with PHP’s basic syntax, variables, and datatypes
- Learn how to integrate the language with web pages
- Understand how to use strings, arrays, and PHP’s built-in functions
- Discover the advantages of using PHP as an object-oriented language
- Explore how PHP interacts with databases, such as SQLite and MySQL
- Learn input- and output-handling best practices to prevent security breaches.
If you’re like most developers, you rely heavily on JavaScript to build interactive and quick-responding web applications. The problem is that all of those lines of JavaScript code can slow down your apps. High Performance JavaScript reveals techniques and strategies to help you eliminate performance bottlenecks during development. You’ll learn how to improve execution time, downloading, interaction with the DOM, page life cycle, and more.
Yahoo! frontend engineer Nicholas C. Zakas and five other JavaScript experts — Ross Harmes, Julien Lecomte, Steven Levithan, Stoyan Stefanov, and Matt Sweeney — demonstrate optimal ways to load code onto a page, and offer programming tips to help your JavaScript run as efficiently and quickly as possible. You’ll learn the best practices to build and deploy your files to a production environment, and tools that can help you find problems once your site goes live.
- Identify problem code and use faster alternatives to accomplish the same task
- Improve scripts by learning how JavaScript stores and accesses data
- Implement JavaScript code so that it doesn’t slow down interaction with the DOM
- Use optimization techniques to improve runtime performance
- Learn ways to ensure the UI is responsive at all times
- Achieve faster client-server communication
- Use a build system to minify files, and HTTP compression to deliver them to the browser.