A while ago, I reviewed the jQuery 1.3 and PHP book. This book is published by Pack Publishing and they asked me to review another book for them. This book, written by Keith Pope, is called Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development. As you could have guessed by the title of the book, it shares great information about the Zend PHP Framework. This book was an eye opener for myself too, since I'm a regular user of the CakePHP framework.

I've read the book and wrote a review about it that you can read below. Now, you have a chance to win this 350+ pages thick book and read it yourself!

What you'll learn from this book:

• Introduction to the MVC pattern and how The Zend Framework implements it
• Building a fully functional website using the framework
• How to correctly test your application
• and much more!

Read the review below and make sure to check out how you can win a hardcopy version of this book. Also, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter to get updates on more future giveaways.

"Inspiration can be found everywhere". But what if you're simply empty and have no fuel in your creativity tank left? You can always get stuck at a creativity block, which could have a very big impact.

To prevent this phenomenon from happening to you, I compled a list with 10+ offline ways to keep your creative fluids going to prevent a creativity block.

As you can see by the title of this article, this list aims at the offline ways (by not using your computer) in order to turn your creativity spark into a bursting creative flame. Feel free to share your number one way to keep on being creative! Where do you find your inspiration?

Combining both jQuery and PHP can be very powerful. One of my very popular articles called A fancy Apple.com-style search suggestion is combining these two techniques too, to achieve the desired effect. There are loads of tutorials on the net that also use both techniques, but Kae Verens wrote a complete book about it. The book is called jQuery 1.3 with PHP (by Packt Publishing) and shares great information on how you can combine jQuery and PHP for use on your own website.

I've read the book and wrote a review about it. Now, you have a chance to win this book and read it yourself!

What you'll learn from this book:

• Integrate jQuery into your PHP applications
• Manipulate images non-destructively
• Create your own jQuery plugins
• Use a drag/drop mechanism to sort lists and create hierarchical menus
• and much more!.

Read the review below and make sure to check out how you can win a hardcopy version of this book. Also, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter to get updates on more future giveaways.

A little bit of sad news; This will be the last post on Marcofolio on 2009. I'm going to Austria for two weeks and enjoy a winter sport vacation. But don't worry, I'm planning on finishing this year with another great article.

Just like last year, I contacted several (web)design bloggers and asked them the following question: Could you provide me with the URL of what you think is the best article that you wrote in the past year (2009)? If you do, please add a short description why you found that article the best one. As you can imagine, this post is a round up with the actual best posts from the past year from several great blogs.

I have nothing left to say except to wish you a safe and joyful new year's eve and I hope to see you back (with all your fingers) in 2010! Check out this Christmas card from me and my girlfriend, wishing this to everybody in the world.

Now let's see what the people behind the blogs consider to be their best article from the past year. Smashing Magazine has two entries, but I allowed them since they're from different authors.

Normally, I would ask questions/opinions from people through Twitter. But sometimes, you really need more space for the question/opinion than 140 characters. That's why I wanted to try a new concept on Marcofolio, called Your two cents. I'll lay down two statements (one cent each), and you're free to share your opinion with the world. Of course, I'll share my opinion too.

Keep in mind these are just opinions from me (and hopefully others in the comments) and not facts. If this concept gets loads of response, I'll continue thinking about other statements.

Here are the two statements on which I'm very curious about what you think about them:

“Animation properties, as added in CSS3, don't belong there.”

Webkit based browsers (Safari and Chrome) support CSS animation (transition and animation). It allows the designer to animate an element across a given timespan.

“Lazyloading images should be implemented on every website.”

Lazy loading delays loading of images in (long) web pages. Images outside of viewport (visible part of web page) wont be loaded before user scrolls to them.

So, what do you think about these two statements? Join the discussion!