Professional PHP4 Multimedia Programming
I was approached by Wrox Press to contribute to Professional PHP4 Multimedia Programming as a result of the pieces I had written for Wired Publications’ Webmonkey. I wrote chapters 5 and 10, Manipulating Images with GD and Case Study: Using GD on WAP Sites and PDA, both dealing with PHP’s GD extension. After being introduced to the basic GD functions and their use in Chapter 5, the reader is walked through the creation of a PHP/MySQL-based, WAP-enabled coffee shop finder application using the HAWHAW library. GD functions are used to generate rating graphics on the fly and to convert color photographs into 1 bit, cellphone friendly WBMP graphics. I also contributed appendix H, Setting Up Palm Desktop, POSE, and AvantGo on a Windows Desktop which shows developers without PalmOS hardware how they can set up an effective PDA development environment using the Palm OS Emulator (POSE). I composed all of my contributions using DocBook XML, which I was able to massage into the Microsoft Word template provided by Wrox; that way I was able to spend more of my time writing than wrestling with Word’s template and style quirks. Professional PHP4 Multimedia received a five out of five star rating at Amazon.com based on multiple reader reviews:
