Have you ever said, “Someone should (fill in the blank)…?” I’ve been saying that to myself since I read “Javascript: The Good Parts.” Someone should write a book about PHP’s good parts. And it should be me. So, yesterday I decided to kick out the jams and get started on a project that’s been on my mind recently: PHP -> The Good Parts.
The plan is a short guide to PHP—not a “nutshell book”—but subset of PHP comprised of the awesome parts, and the coding practices that use these functions. This will not be another 4 pound compilation of PHP documentation. Nope, this will be short and sweet, and useful—something I would want to read myself.
Here’s some of the things you never see in run-of-the-mill PHP books.
- How to build a reusable Rails-style framework in 2o minutes.
- Awesome form validation techniques, with error display and custom messages.
- A 40 line object-oriented MVC framework that handles 99% of your “framework” needs.
- Fabulous array tricks for printing multi-column sorted tables.
- Implementing an Rails-style Active Record Class in less than 100 lines. This really rocks and is 100% useful.
- “Magic” tricks that we use on the workroom floor, but never put into books.
Stay tuned. It’s going to be a great ride.
–Douglas Putnam
Everyone in the business knows that PHP is the Brawny Brick Layer of web development, but did you know that not all of PHP is really that great? In fact, some of the most used features of PHP are really a big waste of your time and money. PHP can send your web project to Heaven, and the other parts, the Bad parts, will send you spiraling down into the Pit of Despair.
The purpose of PHP—The Good Parts is to point out the Good, and help you to avoid the Bad and Ugly, and go straight to the Blissful.
We believe that you need 3% of PHP’s 1,700 built-in functions to do 97% of the PHP projects you’ll face. We’ll boldly show you the names of the functions, how to use them, and, best of all, how to write idiomatic PHP that saves time and makes money. Along the way, we’ll be candid and opinionated and we’ll lay it all on the table.
I’ve read dozens of PHP books over the last 10 years. I’ve taught hundreds of students the keys to successful PHP development. Now I’m putting it into a small, intense package: PHP—The Good Parts.
Douglas Putnam
HackingTheValley.blogspot.com
Have you ever said, “Someone should write a book about (fill in the blank)…?” I’ve been saying that to myself since I read “Javascript: The Good Parts.” Yesterday I decided to kick out the jams and get started on a project that’s been on my mind recently: PHP -> The Good Parts.
The plan is a short guide to PHP—not a “nutshell book”—but subset of PHP comprised of the awesome parts, and the coding practices that use these functions. This will not be another 4 pound compilation of PHP documentation. Nope, this will be short and sweet, and useful—something I would want to read myself.
Here’s some of the things you never see in run-of-the-mill PHP books.
- How to build a reusable Rails-style framework in 2o minutes.
- Awesome form validation techniques, with error display and custom messages.
- A 40 line object-oriented MVC framework that handles 99% of your “framework” needs.
- Fabulous array tricks for printing multi-column sorted tables.
- Implementing an Rails-style Active Record Class in less than 100 lines. This one is really rocks and 100% useful.
- “Magic” tricks that we use on the workroom floor, but never put into books.
Stay tuned. It’s going to be a great ride.
–Douglas Putnam
I love books that keep it simple and give me just the information I need to get the job done. Here are some of the books that are high on my recommended list: any book by Dan Cederholm (simplebits.com), Douglas Crockford (Javascript: The Good Parts), Albert Camus (The Stranger), Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis), David Touretzky (Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation), Sheldon Axler (Prelude to Calculus), and many others. I won’t bother you with my complete list of great books in this post.
Lately I’ve been looking for a good book about Web Design because I’m not a good designer, but I’d like to have my sites suck less. So today I got an email from Pragmatic Programmers pimping their latest beta book. I’ve tried a few of their books in the past and found them to be OK. Programming Ruby is OK (the first edition), and Agile Web Development with Rails is so-so (verging on cheer leading puffery), and the Protoype/Scriptaculous book was a little lame. But I thought I’d check out their latest, Web Design for Developers: Making Design as Easy as Coding.
OK, here’s where I’m tempted to go really negative. But I won’t. I’m going to exercise forbearance for a change…
So, I went to the author’s web site, and I thought, “This is the guy who’s going to show me how to design a good-looking web site??? No way!!!” As for the site, you can look it up yourself, and tell me I’m wrong.
As usual, the moral of this story is clear: avoid books with the words easy or simple in the title.
P.S. For a good book on web design, look no further than Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design.
I’ve had it with Head First books. I’ll admit that the Head First Design Patterns caught my interest and gave me hope that other Head First books would live up to the hype. But…
Now I’m bored to tears with their recycled cutesy photos of skeptical chicks and goofy dudes. Stop recycling your banal images, guys. My feeling now about these faux books is, Seen one, seen them all.
Now there’s a rumored Head First PHP and MySQL book. I know that the Head First machine will crank out the same tired crap one more time. More recycled pictures of quizzical hot nerd babes staring spunkily at the camera, more wise-ass know-it-all gurus, more “hand drawn” diagrams on the text, lots of white space, blah, blah, blah.. This pseudo cogsci garbage has had it’s 15 minutes. Please make it go away.
Just to show that I’m not all negative all the time, I should tell you that I do appreciate a well-written book, and there are quite a few out there.
Here’s my idea of a good book, one that gets to the point and doesn’t waste my time. It’s Javascript: The Good Parts, by Douglas Crockford. Life is short, programming Javascript long. Why not focus on the good parts. When you’re spending an eternity in Hell, you can go through the entire Javascript Bible…all 1015 pages of it. I’ll be in heaven with Javascript: the Good Parts, all 170 pages of it.
Want another one? Try this: Common Lisp — A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation. You can get it free online. This is a well done programming book, indeed.
If you’re not in a technical mood, A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert is as good as it gets. You’ll want to read this one every ten years for the rest of your life. It’s that rewarding.
We need these books. Will one of you smart people please write them, soon?
- Ruby: the Good Parts
- PHP: the Good Parts
- Lisp: the Good Parts
- Python: the Good Parts
- Life: the Good Parts
When I’m not hacking on Javascript and PHP at Yourversion.com, I teach PHP and Ruby courses at CCSF and CSM. And next summer I’ll have a Python course at CSM. Up to now, these courses have been F2F—face to face. But now there’s trouble in River City.
Enrollment for F2F courses has been on the decline since the DotCom Bubble ruptured. The trouble is that the bar has been raised for fledgling Web Developers. In 2000 you could take a single HTML course and get a job as a Webmaster. Think about it—when’s the last time you heard someone say they were a webmaster?
Now consider this fact: enrollment jumps 50 to 100% when we put a course online. This means that we’re gonna put lots of courses on line—as many as courses as we can, as fast as we can.
Not everyone is happy with this. There are some teachers who hate online courses. The Luddites are yelling, The sky is falling! Online courses can’t be monitored. Online courese are an invitation to cheating! Robots will take our jobs!
I happen to think that’s true. The sky is falling. And the robots, and the glaciers, are coming…someday. It’s inevitable that many teachers will be replaced by software that will be indistinguishable from a human teacher. Adultfriendfinder.com already has bots that can pursuade eager young fellows that they’re talking to a really hot girl. How big a leap would it be to create a bot that mimics a pretty good Computer Science teacher?
I know a few AI guys who would be proud to put a few teachers out to pasture with some really cool didactic software… These guys are thinking big. I mean really big—big, as in reverse-engineering the human brain and all that. They’re thinking Holodeck, Baby!
But the real problem isn’t that a few teachers are replaced by machines. The Big concept I’m getting at is that human evolution will be altered in Age of Online Education. Those who can learn online will thrive. Those who require the human touch will not have the option of attending F2F classes; there won’t be any. Brick and mortar classrooms will be relics of the olden times, from the days of the Little Red Schoolhouse. And there won’t be teachers to help these lost souls, because teachers will fade away like unwanted ghosts as they drift into other professions.
Students who can’t learn online will be S.O.L. If you can’t learn online, you’re destined for a life of manual labor. Someone has to sweep the floors and bag the groceries, and it might be you, or your descendants.
You’ve heard this story a thousand times: the Big Success talks about his struggle, how he persisted when the odds were against him, how he wouldn’t have made it without that special teacher or mentor who turned him on to math, or chemistry, or literature. Wc an all look back and find a teacher or mentor in our lives. My mentor was my Spanish teacher, Mr. Meyers. He talked me out of going to West Point and saved me from a world of pain.
But I don’t think we’ll be hearing these Mentoring stories in future generations. Teachers will be extinct. And without teachers, Mentor/Student relationships will be impossible. There will be no more Obi Wan Kenobis. Just online courses.
Then again, it won’t matter, really. After all, the glaciers are going to be passing over this neighborhood in 50,000 years or so. I hear that there are no schools—or people—under 2,000 feet of ice. I know this is true. I saw it online, on the Discovery Channel web site.
My little X61T arrived with Vista on it. It didn’t seem too bad in the beginning. Lots of garish colors, pointless transparency and shadows everywhere. Vista—expensive and tasteless. Looks aren’t everything, or, in this case, any thing.
And pop-up security warnings everywhere. Hanging around Vista reminds me of that 2nd-world country I visited, the one with Uzi-armed soldiers protecting the well to do shoppers while they did their banking and shopping. Using Vista, I felt safe, as safe as living inside a walled compound in the suburbs of Medellin.
Then the damn thing started going flaky. I couldn’t install Cygwin. Firefox would die leaving behind an undeletable lock file. Every Google query returned, “Oh. All you have to do is reboot, then you can restart ‘Fox. It’s just like Windows 3.1!”
Then Vista went from Bad to Worse. I couldn’t shut the damn computer off. It would spin for 20 minutes before the lights would go out. Many times I brute-forced the power button to just MAKE IT STOP!
Sorry for screaming…
But, clever lad that I am, I had bought the XP restore disks when I ordered the thing. Last night I clobbered Vista with XP. Firefox restarts. Cygwin works. My benchmark Ruby scripts run 10% faster. My battery lives a little longer. Life is good now, as good as XP, at least.
I banish Vista, and the unscrupulous ghouls that foisted it upon us, to the Fourth Circle of Hell, where they will be punished eternally for their greed and avariciousness. That is, if there’s anything left of them to banish after that cool Mac guy finishes tearing them another fundamental orifice.
Aroint ye, Vista! Aroint ye, Windows 7! Shame on you, Microsoft! There’s a special place in Hell for the unscrupulous purveyor of time-wasting junk.
Doug Putnam has been teaching PHP at CCSF for almost a decade. He is currently teaching courses in PHP and Ruby at the City College of San Francisco and the College of San Mateo.