Hi, Learning to program can be a frustrating process for a lot of people; especially for designer types wanting to learn a little PHP. The following tips should help a lot of you along the way to becoming a PHP nerd. My PHP learning tips: 1. Be patient: Patience is a virtue, especially when learning…
Once and a while, I get a question from a student about PHP and programming that I use in a blog post … here we go again: … you mentioned that you used to use mostly Java but have switched to mostly PHP. Would you recommend learning PHP as a primary method of creating dynamic…
I recently got an email question put to me by someone wanting to know what makes a professional programmer: Since I have started my career, I have been working for managers who really don’t know how to program. I have been improving myself through tutorials and books. However, I still don’t know whether i’m a…
Recently we had to make an emergency move from our old servers (where we had been for 5-6 years) to our own dedicated server because of technical difficulties in the heads of the nerd’s who managed the servers killersites.com had been sitting on. I will spare you the details of my server migration ordeal for…
In my last post I wrote about how Ruby’s early problems around 2006-2007: – incomplete libraries – difficult web server integration .. had played a role slowing its adoption. The main thrust of the piece was to point out that despite the explosion of interest, Ruby and Rails had failed to make much of a…
In 2006 I created killerphp.com because I wanted to make it easy for web designers to learn PHP. I thought PHP was THE predominate web programming language and I felt every web designer should include PHP as one of their core coding skills: – html – css – php – javascript. Then Ruby came along…
Hi, In this video, I talk a little about the MVC design pattern with special attention to the middle layer in MVC: the ‘controller’. A few points: – MVC is short for Model View Controller – The Controller is the part that brokers the communication between the View and the Model. – The Controller is…
In this video, I discuss how learning another programming language will make you a better PHP programmer. This may seem strange at first, but watch the video and you will see that I am not smoking anything …
Hi, In response to my a recent podcast where I recommended that PHP programmers learn the Zend Framework, I was asked why I choose Zend, rather than other PHP frameworks. The video:
Hi, In this HD video (running time: 4:06), I answer a question put to me recently: Should you always use MySQL as your database when working with PHP? Yes, this is a beginners question, I know. Nonetheless, it is a legitimate question that I think is worthy of comment. In answering this question though, I…