PHP Reference Book by Mario Lurig

“This is a great quick reference book that presents content and examples in a way that it serves both beginners and intermediate users alike. A must buy book!”

- Rak Shekhar, Founder, PHPCatalyst.com

If you didn't win the book, you can still download a PDF version of it for free on the website!

BeCreative Magazine

BeCreative Magazine is an online design/social media magazine. It's also a blog for people who want to learn how to design, code and write online. Whether you need to know how to design a website from scratch, start developing themes or maybe even want to learn how to write properly for the web we've got it.

HiddenPearls Web Development Services

HiddenPearls is a web development service who specializes in PSD to HTML conversions. Get in touch with them today!

Envato

I can't say enough great things about Envato. I owe so much of my success to them. They've provided me with an amazing job, great work environment, and wonderful people who have mentored me over the years. Thank you Envato for all you've given me.

PacktPub

Our books and publications share the experiences of your fellow IT professionals in adapting and customizing today's systems, applications, and frameworks.

DigWP

Written by WordPress veterans Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr, Digging into WordPress is 400+ jam-packed pages of everything you need to get the most out of WordPress. WordPress is great right out of the box, but unless you want an ordinary vanilla blog, it is essential to understand the full potential of WordPress and have the right tools to get the job done.

Are My Sites Up?

Your clients and/or customers don’t care that a hamster chewed through a network cable somewhere in Northern California. They want their website up. You need to find out before they do so you can react fast!

Apress Publishing

Apress is a technical publisher devoted to meeting the needs of IT professionals, software developers, and programmers, with more than 700 books in print and a continually expanding portfolio of publications. Apress provides high-quality, no-fluff content in print and electronic formats that help serious technology professionals build a comprehensive pathway to career success.

A special thank you to Simon of Apress for his extreme kindness and patience with me while I got everything sorted out, you've been amazing Simon!

Thanks again to our sponsors!

UPDATE!

As of January 14, 2010 I will be picking and emailing the random winners and ensuring those who won are eligible to receive the prize. Please check your inbox and make sure no messages get caught in your spam filter over the next few days. More updates shortly!

The Giveaway Items/Products

We have 11 amazing items and products to giveaway to our readers, they are as follows.

PHP Reference Book (Print Edition)

Courtesy of Mario Lurig - Author

A collection of over 250 PHP functions with clear explanations in language anyone can understand, followed with as many examples as it takes to understand what the function does and how it works. One of the best PHP books to keep around as a PHP reference.
This PHP reference includes numerous additional tips, the basics of PHP, MySQL query examples, regular expressions syntax, and two indexes to help you find information faster: a common language index and a function index.

2 Spotify Invites for the Free to Use Version!

Courtesy of BeCreativeMagazine

Millions of songs - instant and simple
Discover and share music with your friends

Not available in all countries

$25 Amazon Giftcard

Courtesy of BeCreativeMagazine

BeCreative Magazine is an online design/social media magazine. It´s also a blog for people who want to learn how to design, code and write online. Whether you need to know how to design a website from scratch, start developing themes or maybe even want to learn how to write properly for the web we´ve got it.

FREE PSD to XHTML Conversion ($123 value)

Courtesy of HiddenPearls

HiddenPearls is offering a free PSD to HTML conversion for one homepage and one contact page, a $123 value, absolutely free to one lucky winner! Be sure to follow him on Twitter!

FREE 3 Month TUTS+ Subscription

Courtesy of Envato

From graphics to web development, audio to video and more, get the skills you want from our family of tutorial and resource sites. Need more? We also offer a Plus program where you can access source files and bonus tutorials.

$50 Credit to any one of the Envato Marketplace

Courtesy of ActiveDen, AudioJungle, ThemeForest, VideoHive, GraphicRiver, 3dOcean, and/or CodeCanyon.

The Envato Marketplaces allow anyone to buy or sell digital goods like WordPress themes, stock audio, After Effects project files, Flash templates and much more. The marketplaces are home to a thriving community of over 300,000 users, authors and buyers and everyday hundreds of new files are added.

AJAX and PHP: Building Modern Web Applications 2nd Edition (paperback)

Courtesy of PacktPub

This book is a step-by-step, example-driven AJAX tutorial, featuring complete case studies. Each chapter contains a friendly mix of theory and practice, so that your journey through the book will be pleasant, yet efficient. You’ll be coding your first AJAX application at the end of the first chapter, and with each new chapter you’ll develop increasingly complex AJAX applications featuring advanced techniques and coding patterns.

Digging Into WordPress the Book (pdf)

Courtesy of DigWP

Written by WordPress veterans Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr, Digging into WordPress is 400+ jam-packed pages of everything you need to get the most out of WordPress. WordPress is great right out of the box, but unless you want an ordinary vanilla blog, it is essential to understand the full potential of WordPress and have the right tools to get the job done.

One Standard Premium Account for Are My Sites Up?

Courtesy of Chris Coyier

Your clients and/or customers don’t care that a hamster chewed through a network cable somewhere in Northern California. They want their website up. You need to find out before they do so you can react fast!

Beginning Zend Framework (print edition)

Courtesy of Apress Publishing

The Zend Framework is one of today’s most popular PHP–based web application development frameworks. Beginning Zend Framework is a beginner’s guide to learning and using the Zend Framework. It covers everything from the installation to the various features of the framework to get the reader up and running quickly.

Beginning Python From Novice To Professional, Second Edition (pdf)

Courtesy of Apress Publishing

Gain a fundamental understanding of Python’s syntax and features with the second edition of Beginning Python, an up–to–date introduction and practical reference. Covering a wide array of Python–related programming topics, including addressing language internals, database integration, network programming, and web services, you’ll be guided by sound development principles. Ten accompanying projects will ensure you can get your hands dirty in no time.

Updated to reflect the latest in Python programming paradigms and several of the most crucial features found in the forthcoming Python 3.0 (otherwise known as Python 3000), advanced topics, such as extending Python and packaging/distributing Python applications, are also covered.

How Do I Enter?

Simple and takes merely seconds! Follow these steps:

1. Tweet about this post on twitter using any text you like. Nothing fancy. Here is a link you may use http://bit.ly/6kzEwQ
2. Leave a comment below about which items you would like to win. Please list at least three (please add more if you can!) in case your desired item is already taken if you win.
3. That's it, I told you it was simple!

As the comments grow larger, you will want to consider requesting choices that haven't been requested as much, to improve your chance of getting your first choice if you win.

How are the winners determined?

Random. All Random. We will choose random winners when the contest is over and try to give them their first item choice, if available. There will be 11 total winners, so be sure to follow the above steps to enter!

Please Support Our Sponsors!

This contest just would not have been possible without some amazing and very generous people and companies. Please take a minute of your time to give one of them a browse when you have the chance. Special thanks to:

• Mario Lurig
• BeCreativeMagazine
• HiddenPearls
• Envato
• PacktPub
• DigWP
• Chris Coyier
• Are My Sites Up?
• Apress Publishing

Once again, please join me in saying a huge "thank you!" to our sponsors!

Support Dev-Tips

We've grown a lot in one year, and we're hoping to continue to see that trend in the year 2010. If Dev-Tips has helped you out in anyway in the past year, I ask you to please consider making a small donation to help us offset the cost of hosting and running the site. Any and all donations are very much appreciated.

Follow @Dev_Tips and @DrewDouglass on Twitter!

Enter now!

Read through the contest steps above, and enter your comment now for a chance to win one of the 11 items!

When Will the Winners be Picked?

We will be picking a winner around January 13th. We may extend this a bit to give everyone a fair chance to enter.

Introducing "Minerva"

Minerva is a fresh and clean site template that works great as a portfolio, personal, blog, or corporate site. Minerva comes packed with features and is ready to go out of the box. It even comes with a working AJAX & PHP contact form w/ spam protection!

Screenshots

Home Page

Footer

Contact Page

Blog Comments

Theme Features

• Working AJAX & PHP Contact form.
• Nice jQuery effects in the Footer and ‘Share This’ section.
• Easy to use jQuery Slider in the header.
• Custom Font Embedding with Cufon, falls back on awesome font stacks and still looks great.
• 5 Different page types included.
• Supported in all major browsers, including IE6!
• Valid XHTML
• Custom and in depth online and offline documentation and support.
• Clean, elegant, and semantic code aids in good SEO .
• Minimal use of images and creative use of sprites to save loading times.
• Special attention paid to elements and typography, see demo page.

Demo, Documentation, & Support

http://designthirst.net/themes/minerva/ – Live Demo

http://designthirst.net/docs/minerva/ – Online Documentation

http://twitter.com/DesignThirst – DesignThirst on Twitter

Get Minerva now!

You can get Minerva right now, available exclusively through ThemeForest.

Feedback, Updates, and Feature Requests

If you didn't know, once you buy a theme on ThemeForest, you can download any updates made to that item for free at anytime! That said, we're about to release Minerva version 1.1 version 1.1 has been released!, which comes with some small enhancements, so no matter when you buy it, you'll forever have access to upgrades for free!

I'd love to hear any feedback or feature requests, let me know what you think!

Below are the items that have been kindly donated so far.I will update the list below as they (hopefully!) continue to come in.

• PHP Reference Book by Mario Lurig (Print Edition).
• Spotify Invites (for the free version, no monthly fees!) and a $25 Amazon Gift Card. donated by BeCreativeMagazine.
• FREE PSD to XHTML Conversion (Homepage and one contact page!) a retail price of $123 by Hidden Pearls.
• 3 Month TUTS+ Subcription courtesy of Envato.
• $50 Credit to any one of the following Envato Marketplaces: ActiveDen, AudioJungle, ThemeForest, VideoHive, GraphicRiver, 3dOcean, or CodeCanyon courtesy of Envato.
• Paperback Edition of AJAX and PHP: Building Modern Web Applications 2nd Edition courtesy of PacktPub
• PDF Edition of Digging into WordPress courtesy of DigWP
• One standard premium account for Are My Sites Up? courtesy of Chris Coyier.
• Hard copy of Beginning Zend Framework courtesy of Apress Publishing.
• PDF Version of Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition courtesy of Apress Publishing

Giveaways

We've had some amazing success in the past with book and web development related giveaways, and we'd love to do it again this year! We've been contacted by some great people and are planning on having frequent book reviews and giveaways for the next year on Dev-Tips.

Giveaway Items Needed!

If you have any kind of web development related product or item that you'd like to contribute to the giveaway, please get in touch with us! We are in desperate need of giveaway items, and we'd love to give you some free traffic, so if you have anything at all let us know!

Some items we are looking for (but not limited to):

• Web Dev or Design Books
• Software or Scripts
• Templates or Designs
• Discounts to web apps or memberships to programs

If Dev-Tips has helped you out in anyway at all, please consider donating an item to the giveaway, or making a donation below. We don't ask often, and donations and a small amount of advertisements are what keeps us going.

Submit an Item/Product for the giveaway

To submit an item for the giveaway, please contact us through this form with the subject line of "One Year Giveaway".

All persons who donate an item or product to the giveaway will receive full credit and promotion on Dev-Tips.

Make a Donation

To make a donation to Dev-Tips, simply use the donation button below.

If you make a donation and don't mind me letting me know, I will be sure to credit and link everyone who does this also, as it's the least I can do. If you'd rather stay anonymous that's fine too.

A Giant Thank You!

A big thank you to all of the readers who stuck with us throughout our first year, we've seen solid growth every month and have bigger and better things planned for 2010! Have a wonderful New Year!

The Big Winner!

Congrats to Montana Flynn, the randomly selected winner for the PHP book giveaway. Montana will be receiving an absolutely free copy of the book in the mail shortly. Montana will be using the book to:

I want the book because I need to learn how to write better PHP!

And hey, that's a good enough reason for us.

Congratulation Montana, and thanks to all who entered!

Future Giveaways

This giveaway was so successful, I have been contacted by a few publishers and we will be running frequent book reviews and giveaways! Be sure to subscribe to our RSS Feed to be one of the first to enter the next contest!

P.S. Dev-Tips turns one year old in January! We'll be posting more about this soon and looking for giveaway sponsors, get in touch with us if you are interested, we'd love to chat!