And so it came to pass that I was wandering around downtown Mumbai the other day, purchasing a new Canon snapshot camera, since mine had mysteriously gone missing upon my arrival in Mumbai (mysteriously = I left it on the seat of the taxi from the airport to the hostel). In this neighbourhood, near Victoria Terminus (or VT), I just so happened to run into a number of computer book stores. I made a point of popping in and seeing what sort of PHP books they had.

The answer was: not many. This country is mostly a Microsoft shop, with a few Java people here and there.

But in one store, I did manage to find they had a “low price edition” of my book, which I knew had been published. 30-50$ USD for a book in India is outragageously expensive, so publishers print copies of the exact same book on cheap newsprint paper, and sell them for 10-12$ USD (500 Rs or so) instead.

So, I asked the kind guy who runs the store to take a photo of me with my book, and he was more than happy to oblige, in return for an autograph. I’m famous, hahah!

As I sat down to edit “Core Web Application Programming with PHP and MySQL”, I would sometimes find errors in the text so blindingly obvious and stupid that I would question whether or not I was truly qualified to write such a book. And yet, after talking with some other people who write books (and recalling days when I wrote huge amounts of code), it seems that this is all common and with much proof-reading and the hard work of some friendly reviewers, I was able to write a book of extremely high quality.

Of course, that just meant I would be even more devastated when the first technical errors WERE found in the book.

There have been a couple, but they’re not that killer serious.