I'm very pleased to announce the publication of my book Expert PHP and MySQL, published by Wrox. This book was written by myself, Andrew Curioso and Ronald Bradford. The short of it is, upon finishing my previous book, Developing Web Applications with Apache, MySQL, memcached, and Perl, Wiley asked me if I knew of anyone who would like to write a MySQL/PHP book. I had worked with Andrew at Lycos and found him to be a brilliant PHP developer, having been the primary developer of Lycos's Webon product-- which has some excellent usage of PHP, Javascript and MySQL. When I friend of mine Bob Wilkins, who started MyVBO, was looking for a developer I suggested Andrew (he now works at MyVBO), and for this book I also suggested Andrew. Andrew had also written a short book for O'Reilly on AJAX, so Wiley was glad to have …

I just uploaded one of my chapters in my book "Developing Web Applications using Perl, Memcached, MySQL and Apache" (Wiley). This was the 50% point. Man, this is a ton of work. Writing a book really takes up every second of your life, which is really hard when there are other projects you maintain - namely DBD::mysql, Memcached UDFs, FederatedX and my interest in helping with Drizzle. I've tried as much as possible to use my projects as material for the book making it possible to do two things at once, as well as make it interesting to write.

It's harder to write on reference material and explaining basic concepts than it is to write about code examples. The code examples I really enjoy because they are first interesting, and secondly there are some tricks and code functionality (particularly with Perl, DBI, stored procedures, etc) that I have never tried out before despite having been writing code for many years, that this book has …