I have officially arrived

I was at the Search Monkey Developer Launch tonight to answer questions and give demos to the attendees. The event itself was a nice success, but that's not what I'm writing about. What I'm writing about is one particular attendee. Apologies to this guy if I embarrass him, but he had to know I'd say something.

After getting through the initial queue of developers asking about Search Monkey, I was approach by a tall young man:

<guy> Hey, you're Sara Golemon, right?
<me>  Yeah...
<guy> Nice to meet you, I really like your blog entries about how PHP works,
     and I bought your book!
<me>  Oh fantastic! Are you enjoying it?
<guy> Yeah, it's really heavy, and I haven't had a chance to use a lot,
     but I was experimenting with writing my own libssh2 wrapper...

By this point, I'm suitably blushing. I'm easily swayed by compliments thanks to my lack of self-esteem. Then he takes a turn...

<guy> I almost emailed this to you, it's a photo my girlfriend took of me without warning...
     Let me just find it in my camera
* guy shows photo of himself lying in a water-filled bathtub, naked, covering his... bits
     with a copy of my book

I... um... well... okay... I can see why you wouldn't email that out of the blue.... Now, I try to think of myself as a fairly progressive, hard-to-phase sort. I can tell a dirty joke with the best of 'em, but this just... left me giggly for the next hour. Like, um...wow... okay... Thanks for sharing...

Is this a sign? Is it a measure of notoriety when strangers show you naked photos of themselves at random tech gatherings?

Extending and Embedding PHP

It's official!!!! After a year in development Extending and Embedding PHP is now shipping from fine book stores everywhere.

I've gotten good reviews from the half dozen people I know who've gotten their hands on it, and I am really satisfied with most of it. Do I think it could be better? Of course I do, but I don't think I was ever going to be completely satisfied.

I've learned a lot through this process and while I don't see any more titles in my immediate future (there are things coming down the pipe which are likely to change my availability), I do expect that my next book, should it materialize, will be even better.

If you pre-ordered it, you should see it soon, if you've already got your copy, let me know what you think! Did I skim over some topic too quickly? Did I belabour something else? If this book eventually finds it's way into a 2^nd edition (no promises mind you), are there topics you want to see added? Tossed out? Expanded/Compressed?