Social networking doesn’t always make you procrastinate, sometimes it pays off! When @packtauthors tweeted that they were looking for someone to author a book on PHP and MongoDB, I made contact. Few weeks later I signed a contract for writing the book. And six months after that, I am pleased to announce that PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner’s Guide is published and out for sale!
In this post I intend to share a few words about the motivation behind the book and the journey of a first time author.
The Motivation
I’m a supporter of the idea the MongoDB can potentially be the new M in LAMP. The web application data storage requirements have changed a lot during the past 4-5 years. Instead of producing contents of their own, the most popular websites are hosting contents created by their users. These contents are diverse in nature and humongous in volume. Mapping the diverse data into a rigid data structure gets harder as the volume grows. This is where the ‘Flexible Schema’ nature of MongoDB fits really well. Also MongoDB is easy to learn, developers with relational database experience should find little trouble adapting to it. There is a lot of similarity between the underlying concepts of an RDBMS and MongoDB (think documents for rows, and collections for tables). Developers don’t need to wrestle with radical ideas such as column-oriented or graph theory based data structures as some other NoSQL databases require them to. Finally, it is open-source, freely available (Creative Commons License), supports multiple platforms (Windows/Linux/OS X), have great documentation and a very co-operative community, and plays nicely with PHP! All these have lead me to believe that in near future MongoDB will be where MySQL is right now, the de facto database for web application development (I would urge you to read Stephen O’Grady’s article which makes more persuasive arguments). And since PHP is the dominating language for web programming, writing a book on web development with PHP and MongoDB felt just right.
The intended audience for this book are web developers who are completely new to MongoDB. It focuses on application development with PHP and MongoDB rather than focusing only on MongoDB. The first few chapters will try to ease the reader into understanding MongoDB by building a simple web application (a blog) and handling HTTP sessions with MongoDB as the data back-end. In the next chapters he will learn to solve ‘interesting’ problems, such as storing real-time web analytics, hosting and serving media content from GridFS, use geospatial indexing to build location-aware web apps. He will also brainstorm about scenarios where MongoDB and MySQL can be used together as a hybrid data back-end.
The Inspiration
Scott Adams, the creator of the famous Dilbert comic strip, wrote an inspirational article on Wall Street Journal. I’m going to quote a few lines here:
“I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The ‘Dilbert’ comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.”
These words moved me. I like programming and I like writing, and although there are smarter programmers and better writers out there, by combining these two passions I could potentially produce something. Besides I had an amazing learning experience with MongoDB. I built an API analytics solution with MySQL which became difficult to handle as the volume of the data grew. I started playing with MongoDB as a potential alternative. A month later I moved the entire data from MySQL to a more solid and scalable solution based on MongoDB. I wanted to share this learning experience through a series of blog posts but lacked the personal discipline and commitment to do so. Being obligated a deliver a book within tight deadlines solved that problem!
I also must thank Nurul Ferdous, my friend and former colleague who is a published tech author himself. His guidance and influence has been instrumental.
The Journey
My journey as an author writing a book for the first time has been an exhaustive yet amazing one! I work in a tech startup, which naturally requires longer than usual hours and harder than usual problems to solve. I would come home late and tired, research on MongoDB topics, plan how to deliver the message to the reader, write code, test and debug the code, write the content on a text editor, fight with Microsoft Word so the content has proper formatting as required by the publisher. Then on weekends I would revise and rewrite most of what I have done over the week and hustle to make the deadline. Nevertheless it all had been a rewarding experience.
In the rewrite phase I had a lot of help from the technical reviewers – Sam Millman, Sigert De Vries, Vidyasagar N V and Nurul Ferdous. They corrected my errors, showed me what more could be added to the content and what should be gotten rid off, helped me communicate complicated topics to readers in a clearer way. I convey my sincere appreciations to them!
Time to end this lengthy blog post. I hope you find this book enjoyable and use it to build some really cool PHP-MongoDB apps! I will then consider my endeavor to be a success.
