In January, the new book will commence its long awaited publishing process online. The book has been a long time coming since I started posting my now infamous tutorial series which focused on the practical side of creating an application more so than acting as a reference book. The book is being made available free of charge online funded by donations and some advertising.

The book will be released over time with chapters made available as they are finalised. I’ve written a small web application to showcase the book online and everyone is invited to comment on chapters so later versions are improved where they need it most. To enable this community review, I’ve implemented a commenting system which let’s you comment at the end of every chapter – but you can also post comments on each individual paragraph! Every paragraph of the online version has a jQuery powered inline comment system which is unobstrusive with faded links after each paragraph to hide/show the related comments. I borrowed the idea from the Django Book which uses something similar to great effect.

The first chapter to be published is the Introduction to the book – others will follow quickly since I have four chapters finalised. I have not decided just yet whether to make PDF versions immediately available for free (bandwidth issues) or only for a small charge to ensure bandwidth and server expenses are further covered. If there’s enough demand I can try PDFs for free for a while and see how bandwidth holds up.

You can see how the website is moving by clicking the thumbnail below (with a few details to finalise):

Happy Christmas everyone!

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  3. An Example Zend Framework Blog Application Tutorial (Revised)
  4. New French Zend Framework Book By Julien Pauli
  5. OAuth Specification and Zend Framework/PEAR Proposal