Ablog

For those that may have already purchased, or are planning on purchasing, The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick you’ll be happy to know that along with your purchase of the print version you will receive a free full color eBook!

The Open Web Application Security Project released a document describing the top 10 security issues in web applications. David Sklar gave some practical examples of these vulnerabilities in PHP applications. There is one item I find missing from the list however and it is what I consider the top security flaw in PHP   (more...)

I’ve heard developers say that their code was bug free, that no possibility in the world existed for the particular code to contain any errors. I’ve always scoffed at such claims and written the developer in question off as one with too big a head. Now, I have something to throw back at them - the binary search! How many times have you written a binary search? The technique is well known and established and there isn’t much deviation in different people’s code for binary searches.

So, most   (more...)

If you are programming any publicly available web site, you need to be aware that user input can be tainted by a malicious user. You need to clean the input to be sure there are not any XSS attacks, SQL injection attacks, or just any HTML inserted you don’t want. An easy way to accomplish this task, if you are using PHP as your language, is to use the PHP Input Filter. This is a simple (free) PHP class that you can easily clean user input with. You can find detailed instructions   (more...)

I couldn’t be happier to announce the publication of Beginning GIMP by Akkana Peck. This book will show you everything you need to become proficient in the use of GIMP, the Photoshop of open source. While there are several other books published on GIMP, they are either very outdated or a non-English publication. Beginning GIMP covers the 2.2 release of GIMP, but also keeps an eye   (more...)

Pro PHP XML and Web Services has just been published. Congratulations to author Rob Richards and the entire book team! This new book is the comprehensive guide to PHP and XML. Weighing in at just over 900 pages of pure PHP and XML joy, with no fluff added, this book will teach you everything you need to know about the killer new XML features in PHP5 and PHP6.

To celebrate, you can enter a raffle for a free copy at Codewalkers   (more...)

Seeing as this is my first blog post, I thought it might be fitting to explain how I first came to know about Apress as a publisher. I was just getting ready to set up a new mail server and rather than deal with the horror that is sendmail, I decided I would go with qmail. Well, I came across the excellent resource Life with qmail. I then found that the author of the site, Dave Sill, had written a book called The qmail Handbook.   (more...)