intval/book.phpguide.co.il

open php book in hebrew

Open, crowd-source written php book in hebrew for beginners

book.phpguide.co.il is an attempt to create a php book for beginniers by the community. It aims to provide high quality good learning material to the very beginners sourcing the knowledge of the community, rather than a single author.

Editting this book

General guidlines about what to do and how to make this book a perfect learning experience for beginners are described in the "Write a chapter" chapter.

Technical how-to

This book is a static generated content using docpad. It has a built in editor for text and code we can use to write the chapters, but making it not very trivial for a php developer. Docpad is a javascript application running on top of node.js, therefore you'll need a server with node.js installed. I completely understand this is not trivial and may reduce the amount of people able to contribute, but this threshold might also keep wanna-be's away. Anyway, I'd happily convert it to run on a php static site generator, such as Phrozn or Sculpin if those would provide interactive editting ability like does this one.

Setup

1. Install nodejs
   on Debian: sudo apt-get install nodejs npm
   on Centos: yum install nodejs npm
   on Windows:Download, click next, next

2. Run npm install npm install

3. Run the project: Double click on run.bat This will also work on unix from shell: just ./run.bat.

That's it, the site and admin panel are ready.
Site: http://localhost:9778
Admin: http://localhost:3000

Please submit your pull requests via github. In case of any problems do not hesistate to email me at Alex@phpguide

book.phpguide.co.il's Issues

"PHP insallation" chapter issue

Hello.
In which system the "PHP Installation" chapter sholud engage at?
WAMPServer? XAMPP? or on linux - at the terminal?

or maybe they should download WebMatrix wich run IIS server?

Thx!

Book Format

At the moment, the book content is stored in HTML format (and may be edited using a JavaScript WYSIWYG editor). I think that's a mistake, because it's not as flexible as it would be if we used costumized markup. We do need that kind of flexibility, and here are a few examples what for: exercise sections, warning boxes and footnotes. An interpreter could also number images and basically pre-process the book.

I have been writing with LeanPub for a while now, and while I don't think a format that is fully based on Markdown would be the right choise for a book, we could use it as an example. (And add actual markup on top of it.)

An example

Here is a simple example for what we could do:

#Section 1

Hi, this is a paragraph. 

##Sub Section 1.1
This is another paragraph.[^a-footnote]  
A line break can be acheived by leaving two spaces in the end of the line before.

##Section 1.1



Whitespaces between paragraphs, headings and such have no meaning (except the one line break which seperates them, and even that is not required before/after headings, because we know they can only take one line), just like in HTML.

{errorBox}This is an error box.

It can have multiple paragraphs.{/errorBox}

[^a-footnote]: This is a footnote.

And the result:

<section>
    <h2>Section 1</h2>
    <p>Hi, this is a paragraph.</p>
    <section>
        <h2>Sub section 1.1</h2>
        <p>This is another paragraph.<a href="#a-footnote" class="footnote-reference">1</a><br />
        A line break can be acheived by leaving two spaces in the end of the line before.</p>
    </section>
</section>
<section>
    <h2>Section 2</h2>
        <p>Whitespaces between paragraphs, headings and such have no meaning (except the one line break which seperates them, and even that is not required before/after headings, because we know they can only take one line), just like in HTML.</p>
        <div class="error-box">
            <p>This is an error box.</p>
            <p>It can have multiple paragraphs.</p>
        </div>
</section>
<aside class="footnotes">
    <h2>Footnotes</h2>
    <ul>
        <li id="a-footnote"><p>This is a footnote.</p></li>
    </ul>
</aside>

Installation - " 'bin' is not recognized... "

Installing (after the second step)

If followed the two first installation steps, but then it says to run sudo npm install in the cmd, and my machine is running Windows.