Archive for the 'PHP' Category

14th Aug 2007

Becoming a Web (PHP) Developer

Last week, I was asked to give my two cents worth on the process of learning PHP and therefore I came up with the following.

  1. Introduction to PHP — Learn what you can and can’t do with PHP, how similar/different it is to other programming languages, what is object-oriented PHP, etc
  2. Installation — You will need to have a development environment to practise PHP, be it your local machine or a dev server
  3. Basic syntax, data types, and operators
  4. Control structures
  5. Introduction to MySQL
  6. Connecting to MySQL from PHP
  7. Querying MySQL with PHP
  8. Writing custom functions and libraries
  9. Writing a web application or a dynamic website in PHP
  10. Security in PHP
  11. Best practices

And while we are on the topic of becoming a Web (PHP) Developer, Robert Love at Signified has written an article on a list of things you should know about when trying to become a web developer and make lots of money. In his own words:

Over the recent days I’ve been asked to speak with a few new starters where I work. As budding (and not-so-budding) web developers, they’re eager to latch onto the next big thing and blog about it in order to appear cool (oops!). So, in order to stop repeating myself and free up more time for shameless self-promotion, read on if you want to become a web developer and make lots of money.

Remember to engage your sense of humor before reading the article.

And last but not least, my advice to you is to actually start coding and writing applications in PHP because I have always found that the best way to learn something is by doing it.

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13th Aug 2007

Wanna learn PHP?

Recently, a few people have been approaching me with their interest in learning PHP and today, I came across this article PHP 101: PHP For the Absolute Beginner via Digg. Talk about timing!

This area is intended for everyone new to PHP. It opens with a series of informal, entertaining tutorials written by Vikram Vaswani, founder and CEO of Melonfire. These tutorials build on a previously-published 5-part series which has now been updated and extended to embrace PHP 5, making parts of it suitable for those of you who already have worked with PHP 4 in the past.

If you came here to learn about elementary PHP 4 or basic PHP 5, this is for you. Enjoy!

The tutorials are divided into 15 main sections as below:

  1. PHP 101 (part 1): Down the Rabbit Hole
  2. PHP 101 (part 2): Calling All Operators
  3. PHP 101 (part 3): Looping the Loop
  4. PHP 101 (part 4): The Food Factor
  5. PHP 101 (part 5): Rank and File
  6. PHP 101 (part 6): Functionally Yours
  7. PHP 101 (part 7): The Bear Necessities
  8. PHP 101 (part 8): Databases and Other Animal
  9. PHP 101 (part 9): SQLite My Fire!
  10. PHP 101 (part 10): A Session In The Cookie Jar
  11. PHP 101 (part 11): Sinfully Simple
  12. PHP 101 (part 12): Bugging Out
  13. PHP 101 (part 13): The Trashman Cometh
  14. PHP 101 (part 14): Going to the Polls
  15. PHP 101 (part 15): No News is Good News

Enjoy learning PHP!

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Posted in Tutorials, PHP | 2 Comments »

12th Aug 2007

Facebook source code

Facebook source code

The source code of Facebook (a popular social networking website) homepage was exposed on the Internet yesterday due to server misconfiguration. The following is an unofficial response made by Brandee Barker from Facebook:

Some of Facebook’s source code was exposed to a small number of users due to a bug on a single server that was misconfigured and then fixed immediately. It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way. The reprinting of this code violates several laws and we ask that people not distribute it further.

More on this issue:
Techcrunch: Facebook Source Code Leaked
Digg: Facebook Source Code Leaked - Actual PHP Code

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07th Aug 2007

Why are my subqueries slow?

This is why.

Note to self: Only use subqueries ( SELECT * FROM `table1` WHERE `id` IN (SELECT `id` FROM `table2`) ) when it is impossible to achieve the same result using joins.

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16th Jul 2007

12 Coding Languages That Never Took Off

I saw this interesting article Ghosts in the Machine: 12 Coding Languages That Never Took Off on softwaredeveloper.com via digg programming and thought you might also find it interesting.

The programming languages that many people have not heard of are:

  1. ALGOL 68: ALGOrithmic Language 1968
  2. brainfuck
  3. Befunge
  4. REBOL: Relative Expression Based Object Language
  5. ColdFusion (I think this is going to get people discussing.)
  6. Java2k
  7. INTERCAL
  8. VRML: Virtual Reality Modeling Language
  9. SMIL: Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language
  10. Haskell
  11. Delphi
  12. PowerBuilder

Read the full article to discover the background of those programming languages and why they don’t take off.

Side notes:

There are literally over 8,500 programming languages in existence..

Who would have thought? 8,500 is such a huge number.

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Posted in News, PHP | 2 Comments »

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