Lei’s official Weblog

Today, I bought a good book and it was quite unexpected. I went to the Waterstones bookstore located very close to London’s Piccadilly Circus (it’s the biggest commercial bookstore in the UK) during my lunch break. Although I don’t normally visit to bookstores on a Sunday’s lunch break as it’s very short (only 30 minutes), I decided to go today because the stupid pop music in our staff room (where my colleagues and I have lunch, tea, coffee during our breaks) drove me mad. Of course, Im now glad I went there because I found a book I really need at the moment.

Below is the front cover of the book.

As it states on the cover, it covers areas like XML, HTML, CSS & JavaScript, PHP, Databases and Security, etc.. all the important components for developing web applications in today’s world (the book has only been very recently published).

Essentially why this book is so good for me can be summarised in two sentences the author stated in the Preface of the book: “What is attempted here is to provide an essential overview that locks the various subject areas together and gives guidance on where to take your studies further…… The book attempts to grasp what makes the subject such an interesting one to many people and leads them to their own discoveries.”

I have very recently done some reseach on all kinds of popular tools for web-development, and grasped some very basic ideas about them. But to decide which one to focus on and specialise I will need much more knowledge and detailed information. Now, this book will save me tons of time and effort of doing research on my own. I have also done a fair amount of book searching online, most books on web-development are focused on a specific programming language or subjective area, it is quite rare to find a book that provide a overview (not a too simplified one). That’s why it was such a nice surprise for me.

Under normal circumstances I would order the book on Amazon as it’s much cheaper, but because this book was the only copy left and it has a defeat (though I wouldn’t even consider that as a defeat) I was offered a 25% discount. I later checked that it’s only offered at a 5% discount on Amazon.co.uk.