php|architect has announced the release of a new book - the Guide to Programming Magento, now up for preorder:

We're happy to announce the upcoming release of php|architect's Guide to Programming Magento, the first comprehensive guide for developers who want to learn more about the Magento e-commerce platform.

The book, by Mark Kimsal shows you how to install and successfully deploy a Magento installation on your website. The preorder is available right now for a 15% discount and the full PDF version will be released on May 15th, 2008 (print on May 31st). Check out the product page for more information and to reserve your copy today.

On the ThinkingPHP blog today, Felix Geisendörfer shows, based on some of his own personal work, how to make printing simpler inside of a CakePHP application.

The web site I currently work on is going to be for the hotel where my step father is the manager of. One of the things that is going to be an important 'feature' for the site, is to make it printer friendly.

Since the new site has a very clean markup, I thought about simply creating an additonal style sheet for the media type "print". However, after thinking about it a little bit more today, I came to to the conclusion that I'm dealing with WYSIWYG visitors. So I decided to get a little fancier, and to create a PrintController, which would output printable versions of any site requested by /print/*

He gives the code for the controller and for the easy to use link to go over to the "printable version" of each page, hiding the none-printable information from the browser.