Today I’m happy to release my latest book, “Microservices for everyone”! 90% of it was done in July but you know what happens with almost-finished projects: they remain almost-finished for a long time. I did some useful things though, like preparing a print edition of the book.

Foreword

Finally, and I’m very proud of that, I received Vaughn Vernon’s foreword for this book. You may know Vaughn as the author of “Implementing Domain-Driven Design”. It made a lot of sense to ask him to write the foreword, since many of the ideas behind microservice architecture can be traced back to messaging and integration patterns, and Domain-Driven Design. Vaughn is an expert in all of these topics, and it was only to be expected of him to write an excellent foreword.

During the last few days I’ve been finishing my latest book, Microservices for everyone. I’ve used the Leanpub self-publishing platform again. I wrote about the process before and still like it very much. Every now and then Leanpub adds a useful feature to their platform too, one of which is an export functionality for downloading a print-ready PDF.

Previously I had to cut up the normal book PDF manually, so this tool saved me a lot of work. Though it’s a relatively smart tool, the resulting PDF isn’t completely print-ready for all circumstances (to be honest, that would be a bit too much to ask from any tool of course!). For example, I wanted to use this PDF file to publish the book using Amazon’s print-on-demand self-publishing service CreateSpace, but I also wanted to order some copies at a local print shop (preferably using the same source files). In this post I’d like to share some of the details of making the print-ready PDF even more print-ready, for whomever may be interested in this.

Last year in September Len Epp from Leanpub.com interviewed me about my book A Year With Symfony. They have fully transcribed the interview as well as published the recording of the interview.

This is the first time somebody interviewed me about my career and my book writing. I remember back then it made me quite nervous. But I must say that talking with Len was a very good way to shed some light on my own thought process and my personal goals. For instance, who did I have in mind as the reader of my book?

A couple of weeks ago the reader count of my first book A Year With Symfony reached the number 365. It seemed to me an appropriate moment to write something about my experiences. In this post, I will not be too humble, and just cite some people who wrote some very nice things about my book on Twitter.

The book was highly anticipated ever since I first wrote something about it on Twitter. Leanpub book pages have a nice feature where users can subscribe to news about the book release.

Yesterday I presented “Principles of PHP Package Design” at the monthly meetup of the AmsterdamPHP usergroup. This was quite an experimental presentation. I had prepared it on the same day actually, though I had been gathering the contents of it for several weeks.

Package design is a subject I’m very much interested in and you can be sure to hear more from me about it. Actually, I started writing a book about it! If you’re interested too, sign up on leanpub.com/principles-of-php-package-design.

After working on my book “A Year With Symfony” for four months, I published it yesterday at the Dutch Symfony Usergroup meetup in Amsterdam. It was really great to be able to do this real-time while everybody in the room was looking at the screen waiting for the build process to finish.

The book is hosted on Leanpub, which is a great platform for writing and publishing books. They provide the entire infrastructure. You get a good-looking landing page and they handle all things related to payment.

As you may have heard, I’m working on a book for Symfony2 developers. Besides The Book, which is the user documentation for building Symfony applications, some book-like websites and just a few e-books, there are currently no books for intermediate or advanced Symfony developers. My new book, called A Year With Symfony is exactly that.

If you have been reading the documentation and maybe some blog posts, you will want to know how you can get one step further. You wonder how you could structure your application, for it to be maintainable for more than a month. You ask yourself what it would take to write good bundles, which guidelines you and your team should define and follow. You may also question the built-in security measurements and you or your manager would like to know what needs to built on top of them to make a real secure application. A Year With Symfony will help you find an answer to all these questions.