[announce] Thanks to LinuxChix, a book was born!

[Julie Meloni]

[Crossposted with Deb's blessing to announce, grrltalk and techtalk. 
Apologies to those who have to delete it 3 times.]

A few days after I subscribed to the LinuxChix lists, sometime in
October or November of '99, I saw a message from an editor at a
publishing
company, looking for folks who wanted to write books.  I actually got
off my lazy rear-end and replied, and 5 months later a book was born!

It was all very exciting.  I wrote about PHP, this wacky cool scripting
language that all of a sudden has taken the web development world by
storm. (see http://www.php.net/ for more info on PHP)

The book is called PHP Essentials, and you can read all about it,
download the code in it, etc. at its supplementary web site:
http://www.thickbook.com/

My primary goal was to write the kind of book that you could hold on
your lap without bruising yourself, and a book that anyone could learn
something from, not just someone with a degree or two in computer
science (because I don't have one!).  Ultimately, I wanted to write a
book that someone could take off the shelf, skim through, and say, "Hey,
this PHP thing looks like a neat language, and ever-so-easy to learn!"

If you've been thinking about dabbling in programming and didn't know
where to start, I suggest PHP, and I suggest this book. I'm just a
little biased. The book is "learn by example", from installing PHP and a
web server to "Hello World!" scripts and eventually database
administration and e-commerce-y stuff. All in 386 pages or less, and it
won't scare the hell out of you.

I've earmarked a bunch of my free copies for LinuxChix readers, and I'm
using the old "enter a quasi-weekly random drawing" approach to giving
them away.  If you're interested, please visit
http://www.thickbook.com/lchx_survey1.phtml  

After you go off and learn PHP, remember that it is open source!  As a
bonus, the development community is really, really wonderful.  You will
_not_ find the "you're a girl, you can't play here!" mentality.  Heck,
people are even nice when someone says "I'm using PHP on Windows
95/98/2000/NT and IIS...." :)

PHP grows by leaps and bounds every day, because someone comes up with
an idea for a function and someone else says "yeah!" and goes and does
it.  Or, Joe or Jane User is reading the annotated manual at php.net and
finds a bug in the description or a something obscure and system
specific...and adds their two cents instantaneously and for the
betterment of us all.  You can do that, too.  Try it, it's fun!

- Julie
	
+------------------------------------------------+
| Julie Meloni                                   |
| Tech. Director, i2i Interactive (www.i2ii.com) |
| e-mail: jcm at i2ii.com                           |
|                                                |
| "PHP Essentials" ... http://www.thickbook.com/ |
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