Twitter API Up and Running Learn How to Build Applications with the Twitter API

Twitter API Up and Running Learn How to Build Applications with the Twitter API

This groundbreaking book provides you with the skills and resources necessary to build web applications for Twitter. Perfect for new and casual programmers intrigued by the world of microblogging, “Twitter API: Up and Running” carefully explains how each part of Twitter’s API works, with detailed examples that show you how to assemble those building blocks into practical and fun web applications. You’ll also get a complete look at Twitter culture and learn how it has inspired programmers to build hundreds of tools and applications. With this book, you will:

Explore every component of a Twitter application and learn how the API responds Get the PHP and MySQL code necessary to build your own applications, with explanations of how these ingredients work Learn from real-world Twitter applications created just for this book Discover the most interesting and useful Twitter programs–and get ideas for creating your own–with the book’s Twitter application directory

Twitter offers a new way to connect with people on the Internet, and “Twitter API: Up and Running” takes you right to the heart of this technology. “Twitter API: Up and Running is a friendly, accessible introduction to the Twitter API. Even beginning web developers can have a working Twitter project before they know it. Sit down with this for a weekend and you’re on your way to Twitter API mastery.” –Alex Payne, Twitter API Lead “Twitter API: Up and Running is a very comprehensive and useful resource–any developer will feel the urge to code a Twitter-related application right after finishing the book!” –The Lollicode team, creators of Twitscoop

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ActionScript 3 0 for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book

ActionScript 3 0 for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book

The fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn ActionScript® 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional

ActionScript® 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book contains 14 lessons. The book covers the basics of learning ActionScript and provides countless tips and techniques to help you become more productive. You can follow the book from start to finish or choose only those lessons that interest you.

Learn to add interactivity to Flash files using ActionScript 3.0: Control timelines and animation, write event-handling functions, and control loading of and interaction with data, text, video, sound, and images.

“The Classroom in a Book series is by far the best training material on the market. Everything you need to master the software is included: clear explanations of each lesson, step-by-step instructions, and the project files for the students.” —Barbara Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor, Rocky Mountain Training

Classroom in a Book®, the best-selling series of hands-on software training workbooks, helps you learn the features of Adobe software quickly and easily. Classroom in a Book offers what no other book or training program does—an official training series from Adobe Systems Incorporated, developed with the support of Adobe product experts.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars good start with actionscript 3.0
This book is great for beginners who want to learn the fundamentals concepts and features of Actionscript 3.0 , and who want to switch from actionscript 2.0 to 3.0 , it illustrates actionscript 3.0 by the means of practical projects, each chapter has a project with specific goals builds on its previous, and the explanation is clear and step by step instructions and it covers everything you need to know t begin code and animation, and covers the new features of as 3.0 such as pixel bender toolkit, inverse kinematics and developing desktop application with adobe integrated runtime (AIR).

2 Stars I advise against purchasing this book
The ActionScript 3.0 class I took at a local community college used this book as the text book. I went through the book’s chapters in sequential order as assigned by the professor. I personally invested a lot of time into learning AS 3.0 through the book’s exercises, but I have made little progress towards utilizing AS 3.0 full potential.

I own the o’reilly’s essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock and it does a much more through job of teaching ActionScript 3.0, but is designed for people that have some kind of programing background. [...]

What I liked about the is how it took a pragmatic approach to teaching ActionScript 3.0, but the book is littered with errors and does not always take the “best practice approach”. Below is a list of the problems I encountered while going through the chapters.

1. code errors in almost every chapter

2. book was created for cs4, yet the author(s) created files in cs3 not cs4

3. extremely poor design…even though this is an ActionScript 3.0 book they could have at least spent some time working on design. Some of the exercises look terrible.

[...]

5 Stars FINALLY
So ActionScript 3.0 has been out for a couple of years and FINALLY it dawns on Adobe to have a AS3.0 book that is for people that didn’t get a masters’ degree in computer science. And for all you folks that tried with all your might to concentrate hard and start learning 3.0 with a book and pure will, prepare to advance. The book is straight forward, written for designers instead of the other 64 AS3 books.

Now, you can get started. The book tells you helpful things on the way like “you need to get really good at using ‘event listeners’ because you are going to use them all the time in your basic projects”.

You designers have finally found the book to actually get you started. Pretty soon, you’ll be helping the Java and C# programmers with ActionScript instead of the other way around. And your stuff will actually still look nice.

5 Stars Worth the Money
I purchased this book after I read “Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book” in order to get more insight on some the features of ActionScript 3.0. I wasn’t disappointed. I thought the chapters were well organized. And everything worked the way the book said it would. Just follow the directions and you should do well.

Of course, it’s an introductory course. But once you finish, you should be able to work with the online materials to find what you need for more detailed information.

5 Stars A designers way to learn actionscript
This book is simply the best book I have seen for designers to learn actionscript. I have gone through countless actionscript books, all of which seem like they are written by programmers who just assume you know basic programming. I’m a designer, not a coder! This book helped me bridge the divide and I gratefully spent the money on it. It was worth every penny.

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Learning jQuery 1 3

Learning jQuery 1 3

Packed with great examples and clear explanations, this revised and updated version of Learning jQuery teaches you how to use jQuery 1.3. This book is for web designers who want to create interactive elements for their designs, and for developers who want to create the best user interface for their web applications. Basic JavaScript programming knowledge is required. You will need to know the basics of HTML and CSS, and should be comfortable with the syntax of JavaScript. No knowledge of jQuery is assumed, nor is experience with any other JavaScript libraries required.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars jQuery and good client-side web design
I started using jQuery a few weeks ago and immediately saw that it would become an indispensable part of my toolkit. Javascript development has always been a tedious and aggravating exercise for me, but with jQuery it has become a real joy. The api lets you accomplish big things in a concise way. The online documentation is very good, for both jQuery and jQuery UI, so you don’t have to waste a lot of time guessing how to accomplish your tasks. DOM traversal and manipulation is a breeze. There is a wide range of plugins available, and the ones I’ve tried have been well documented and work well.

The api is pretty large, which is why I bought this book. I was hoping to get a better overview than I could get by reading brief tutorials and the reference material. The book definitely delivers, and more.

The book starts with a lengthy tutorial on jQuery selectors. The selectors are based on css selectors, extended with navigational and filtering selectors - for example “#foo:next” will select the node following the node that has id ‘foo’. Using css selectors was a brilliant choice, because it more closely models the way we think about web pages.

The book then has chapters on DOM manipulation, AJAX, table handling, forms, UI effects, etc. Each chapter has complete examples (also downloadable from the publisher’s site), significant enough to be useful as models for one’s own work. The examples work up to a large bookstore example, developed over 3 chapters. The final version of the bookstore shows off most of the features and capabilities of jQuery.

Probably the biggest benefit of this book is that it shows how to use jQuery to cleanly separate content, style, and behavior. Of course, we all think that we do this already, but the examples in this book take that separation to a new level. The html is absolutely clean - no event hooks, relatively few class attributes, and id attribues mostly for identifying large structural elements. The css is minimal and minimally repetitive. The javascript is cleanly separated into style-based and behavior-based code.

I’ve begun adopting this approach in my own work, and it is already making a big difference. And of course this approach makes it possible for a web designer and a developer to collaborate most effectively.

You will benefit from this book even if you are already somewhat familiar with jQuery. Be sure to get the one reviewed here - there is an older version that covers jQuery 1.2, but there are significant differences between version 1.2 and 1.3.

5 Stars excellent.
I dont normally review books but I felt compelled to review this one. The authors have done an excellent job.

This is by far the best IT book I have read, it is simple yet thorough. It will allow anyone with a basic knowledge of CSS/Html to get started programming impressive sites immediately, yet it will also take you into quite a bit more complex functionality by the end of the book.

These authors really have something here.

5 Stars A Must-Read
It’s been nearly two years since the first edition of Learning jQuery was published. In my review of the initial version, I highly recommended it to anyone wanting to learn more about jQuery. I am quite pleased to say that this update is equally as good, bringing the reader up to speed on all the improvements that have been made since. Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer have masterfully refined the examples in Learning jQuery 1.3 to reflect the latest code base.

If you are still on the fence about delving into jQuery, know that there are a lot of successful companies who are using it already, such as those listed on the jQuery home page: CBS, Dell, Digg, Google, NBC, Netflix, WordPress — to name a few. Additionally, Microsoft has made jQuery their JavaScript library of choice, for the upcoming .NET MVC framework — which is somewhat akin to Ruby on Rails.

It is no secret that I am a huge fan of jQuery. In fact, I recently wrote a chapter for an upcoming jQuery book by O’Reilly. Believe me when I say that Karl really knows jQuery and is one of the brightest developers I know. This is a book not to be missed, especially if you are going to frequently be writing JavaScript.

One of the most notable improvements has been in the speed of CSS style selectors. Rather than doing a top-down pass at elements, the latest version of jQuery finds things via a bottom-up approach called Sizzle. This is similar to the way browsers apply stylesheets, and allows jQuery to be significantly faster.

Another key improvement, one that did not exist before, is the addition of “live” effects. Essentially, this allows you to add event listeners on any currently existing elements in a page, as well as all future elements that match the criteria. This means that parts of a page dynamically updated via Ajax can also have enriched interactivity, without calling additional functions to re-parse the page. Under the hood, this is done via abstracted event delegation.

Another thing that has changed since the original book is that “toggle” can now handle two or more functions, cycled through, rather than being limited to only two, as was the case with older versions of jQuery. This means that a single element can be the trigger for an unlimited events throughout a page.

Without specifically calling out every nuance that has been improved upon, suffice it to say that jQuery has continuously been refined and tuned for speed and browser compatibility over the past few years. Enough so, that even if you have the first edition, getting the latest version of this book will greatly benefit your development team, or even you as an individual if you work as a freelancer.

4 Stars Excellent introduction to JQuery and client-side scripting
I’m a programmer with lots of experience in several languages, although I never learned JavaScript — nor had I done client-side web programming outside of static (X)HTML and CSS.

I decided it was time to close this gap, so I chose JQuery as my framework to abstract away the headaches I’d heard about JavaScript, and I chose Learning jQuery 1.3 as my means to learn the platform.

The book provides an excellent tour of jQuery’s capabilities, although the jQuery UI package is not covered (the publisher offers this in a different book).

Each chapter covers a different aspect of jQuery programming, starting with simple examples and finishing with complex/completed functionality. Since this was my first dive into browser-side programming, I also found the book to be an excellent overview for creating the various behaviors I’d seen in practice (such as animating web content, validating forms, and refreshing data without refreshing the page).

New concepts are introduced along the way, and potential “gotchas” are exposed by presenting them as what you think you’d do next — but are then followed by an explanation as to why it’s the wrong thing to do. The book also contains an overview of many of the more popular jQuery plug-ins.

You’re best off downloading the accompanying source code if you want to try the examples yourself, because non-relevant portions of the code and accompanying CSS don’t always appear in the text. My only complaint lies with the example code: It isn’t always well-commented. jQuery’s syntax and extensive chaining can sometimes be non-intuitive, so good commenting is a must in a book like this.

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