Slash dotted 
Woot - the book, The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 2nd Edition, has been slash-dotted - and they actually liked it giving it a 9/10 rating. *gasp*
The reviewer, Michael J. Ross, seems to only have 5 major grips with the book overall:
- Firstly, a reader hoping for a well-edited book will likely become distrustful by the authors’ misuse of the term “that” in place of “who.”
- Secondly, there are far too many ambiguous comments in the first-person, e.g., “I would dare to say that…” In a book written by five authors, the reader naturally has no idea who is speaking.
- Thirdly, there is a fair amount of inconsistency in the formatting of the code throughout the book, including indentation and other spacing, as well as variable naming.
- Also, every instance of a “{” on its own line (presumably to line up vertically with the corresponding “}”), is an antiquated waste of space, since any decent programmer’s editor or integrated development environment (IDE) can do brace matching automatically.
- Lastly, almost all of the section titles begin with the phrase “How do I.” That is fine within the body of the book, at the beginning of every section. But when dozens of these section titles are listed together in the table of contents, that phrase could be excised so each section’s topic would be faster to spot, and there would be fewer unnecessary words.
I can live with those, (to me they are kinda minor),though I have to admit to being the person with a “{” on a new line - sorry but I like my code formatted that way when I am left to my own devices. Call it a quirk if you will - I like to see my braces visually line up.
On the plus side he remarks:
The chapters on error handling and access control are alone worth the price of the book.
Since I was responsible for the chapter on access control - I will take that as a pat on the back.
November 29th, 2007 at 4:01 am
Regarding #4… this is a *book*, I don’t know any paperback with brace matching… do you?
Otherwise, code formatting, should be more consistent, but yeah, we can live with it - and for the titles, I personally would’ve preferred the way he said, but we had a formula and we stuck to it - he gripes about lack of consistency in one place and then bitches about too much in another
Very cool though, the ZCG didn’t get /.’ed so this is cool - especially as my sysadmin pointed it out cause happened to see it
- Davey
November 29th, 2007 at 5:25 am
Congrats on the kudos! (hmm - is that circular?)
I ordered my copy!
November 29th, 2007 at 6:06 am
Awesome! Just saw the /. review.
November 29th, 2007 at 6:30 am
i think point 4 is complete nonsense i dont look at my code everytime in an modern ide
i also use “simple” text editors and there is this sort of code formating the best to quick review of the code and also in an “modern” IDE i like to have my code formated in this way - because the ide/editor might can do automaticly brace matching but my brain cant do this in such a quick way like an editor
November 29th, 2007 at 8:42 am
{quote}I have to admit to being the person with a “{” on a new line {/quote}
Me too. Modern IDE can do the good matching but sometime, beginning block is too long so it is good practice to have { a new line.
November 29th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Lig — I also did the { on newlines for classes and functions… I was trying to be consistent with what I wrote in the Best Practices chapter, funny enough.
And I must have missed that part about the chapters on error handling and ACLs… I did error handling (we really must all get together some time and share which chapters we were responsible for (-: ).
I don’t know about you, but it was surreal for me to be slashdotted — congrats, woman!
November 29th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Great work, congratulations.
November 29th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Congrats, that is cool.
And those gripes are pretty minor stylistic stuff… worth noting, but hard to complain too much about. Keep up the good work.
December 15th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce