Writing has always been a major part of my life.

I love reading, and teaching others through writing. Back in the day I also edited quite a few books, a partial list of which you'll find further down the page.

Books I've written

Easy Laravel 5

My most popular self-published book to date. It has undergone hundreds of revisions since the first release in early 2015.

Easy E-Commerce Using Laravel and Stripe

Co-authored with Laravel News founder Eric Barnes, Easy E-Commerce using Laravel and Stripe was without a doubt the most fun I've had writing a book. It explains how to integrate Stripe into your Laravel application using Laravel Cashier, doing so by building a series of projects to suit the growing ambitions of landscaping company owner Mr. McDew.

Easy Active Record for Rails Developers

Easy Active Record for Rails Developers was written during my 'wilderness years' away from the PHP language . During this time I worked on several fascinating Rails projects, and grew to love Ruby on Rails

Easy PayPal with PHP

I wrote Easy PayPal with PHP after a few incredibly frustrating experiences integrating PayPal into PHP applications.

Beginning PHP and MySQL, Fifth Edition

In print for 20 years, this is the latest edition of my bestselling book to date. It has been translated into multiple languages, including Russian, Chinese, and Italian, among others. Unfortunately due to a contractual dispute with the publisher I wasn't involved with the 5th edition, and do not recommend purchasing this edition.

Beginning PHP and PostgreSQL

Co-authored with PostgreSQL expert Robert Treat, this was an adaptation of the first edition of Beginning PHP and MySQL.

Beginning PHP and Oracle

Co-authored with Oracle expert Bob Bryla, this was an adaptation of the first edition of Beginning PHP and MySQL.

Books I've edited

PHP 5 Recipes

This was a PHP cookbook which were in vogue back before the days of Stack Overflow.

Practical Subversion

Written by Daniel Berlin and core Subversion developer Garrett Rooney, Subversion was the version control system of choice for many years before Git came along.

The Definitive Guide to db4o

This was a niche book about an embeddable database called db4o that is apparently no longer actively maintained these days.

Pro Active Record

I've always loved ORMs like Active Record and Eloquent, so this was selfishly a great book to edit.

The Definitive Guide to Plone

This was about the Python-based Plone CMS, written by Andy McKay who was at the time a member of the core Plone development team.

Practical Ruby Gems

Great book about the Ruby programming language, authored by David Berube who to this day stands out as one of the most thoughtful authors I've ever worked with.

Pro OpenSSH

Editing this book showed me that I had a lot to learn about SSH.

Hardening Apache

This book published at a time when the Apache web server was dominating the Internet.