Notes on style

"Style profile, I said, it always brings me back when I hear Ooh Child" - Beastie Boy's, Intergalactic

This is just a quick section about the style this book's written in. A lot of other books have one, so why not this one?

Code snippets

I've included a lot of code snippets. Please note that where I put:

// ...

that means I've snipped something out, or skipped over something - this means I don't have to include the whole entire file every time I want to just highlight a couple of lines! (Also, it means I can use the <?php opening tag, so I get all that syntax highlighting gubbins with no effort ;-))

Chapter lengths

I'm keeping each chapter short. I don't know about you, but when reading long tech books, I get bored and discouraged when reading 40-page chapters! There are bite marks on the edge of my desk where I've gnawed it in frustration at such times. All the chapters in this book will be short!

Why step-by-step?

Firstly, Li3 is, in some ways, pretty well documented - the code itself is wonderfully commented in great detail and has a whole bunch of unit tests. The documentation at http://li3.me/docs/manual is really well written (although there are some bits missing) and takes you through the features very well. What I wanted, when I was getting to grips with it, was an end-to-end tutorial that covered the things that I want to know.

I'm a software developer, mostly doing websites and mobile applications. There's a lot of things that we commonly do in web development (routing, MVC, and testing in particular), so I figured we'd go through building something that we might actually build that covers a lot of the concepts we use every day. If you're not from a web background, that's fine, I'm sure you'll pick up some pointers!

A quick note on Li3

Li3 was previously called "Lithium" and I might slip here and there and refer to it as such. There are a other few things called Lithium - lithium batteries, the metal, etc - and mostly, when you search for "lithium" you get medical or electronics information. Therefore, when I search for Lithium resources, I usually put "PHP" in the query.