It all started on Friday as we came back from the pub. I was describing how we've been, twice, on Neil Bauman's Geek Cruises but never been asked to talk or lecture, even in a "lightning session" on them. A little wistfully, maybe, as I'm a "wannabe" - I would love to get up and deliver a talk just as I do here in the UK for a living. We came to the conclusion that Neil's not asked me because (a) I'm not a big name in his customer's world which is USAcentric and (b) I've not written published a book. It could also be that we've not been pushy enough - HEY - NEIL ....

I've written a lot, and I still write a lot. You'll find nearly 1000 articles in this series, about a half of which are technical. You'll find over 1000 pages of technical detail in our course notes which we hand out when you come and learn with us and you'll find over 1000 technical postings in our user forum.

So why have I not been published? Well - it's not because I've not been asked (please excuse the double negative) and it's not because people don't read the stuff I write - they do. On a typical weekday, around 300 read my page telling them about the difference between a JOIN and a LEFT JOIN, a further 300 learn about using PHP and MySQL to upload, store and serve images, and even on subjects as obscure as dynamic mapping hits will be into three figures. No - the real reason is that I've simply never felt I have the time to put a complete book together, and proof it, and get it through all the formal publication stages, that I've always felt there are plenty of competing books out there, and that I've always felt that having published a book on our technologies it would only be a matter of weeks before I felt it was out of date or that I had something I wanted to add.

However, we did come to the conclusion on Friday that I have a book, constantly updated and already written, and it's here on this website. The LAMP Cookbook. A number of longer articles on Linux, Apache httpd, MySQL, Perl and PHP in our solutions centre, then a large number of tips and techniques on each of the topics - PHP, Perl, MySQL and Apache httpd and Linux all indexed under category and subcategory.

A quick Google search doesn't - YET - reveal a "LAMP Cookbook" page, so perhaps there's an opportunity there. But then most of my readers here will know that for every 10 good ideas we have, we only have time to bring one of them through to fruition. So perhaps I'll leave you, the reader of this musing, to pick at the pages on this site as my virtual book ... you'll find that each of the topics (such as PHP) goes down into subtopics (such as arrays in PHP, and within there you'll find numerous source code examples such as this one and a whole load of short tips under unlikely names such as breaking bread


Neil, I might be available for a week sometime next summer ...
(written 2006-11-13 07:54:20)

Commentator	says ...
Randal L. Schwartz:	Maybe if you stopped playing with MySQL, and started writing about PostgreSQL, you'd get tapped for a speaking role? :) Anyway, by the time you're on the cruise, our schedules are already pretty full. And prior to that, you have to be a big enough name that you'll draw people worldwide. It's purely about business and marketing, and clearly not personal. (comment added 2006-12-18 04:47:14)
Graham Ellis:	Understood, Randal ... possible answer (a) confirmed ;-) Good to see you here ... hope to see more of you! -- Graham (comment added 2006-12-21 07:07:19)

A100 - Web Application Deployment - The Components of a Web-Based Solution
A601 - Web Application Deployment - Apache httpd - an overview
G208 - Well House Consultants - Library
G901 - Well House Consultants - Talks and lectures
H101 - Introduction to PHP
P101 - Perl - Introduction
S151 - Introduction to SQL and MySQL

Back to Why shouldn't I spam?

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to C++ - just beyond the basics. More you can do

C++ and Perl - why did they do it THAT way?
Hotel door furniture
Training rooms to learn Open Source programming
C++ - just beyond the basics. More you can do
The LAMP Cookbook - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl
Why shouldn't I spam?
Staying at your own hotel
French Exchange
A lion in a cage - PHP
Freedom for X is denial of privacy for Y