Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

Growing up as a geeky little kid born in the 80’s my interests floated around a lot and it wasn’t until I received my first computer at age 9 that I realized where my true interests lie. I eventually got into learning HTML, making simple websites with tables - nothing special, but it kept me busy. My love for web development has only grown into other languages such as PHP and C# .Net which is why news of HTML 5 with new elements makes me a very happy boy.

IBM posted a great article on August 7th regarding the new elements and how each one will affect web development in the future making easier clearer HTML code with less work on the developers part. The main idea behind these elements is to provide cleaner markup by replacing the use of div/span with more suitable elements such as header and nav.

Here is a list of the new elements that will accompany HTML 5:

Structure
section
header
footer
nav
article

Block Semantic Elements
aside
figure
dialog

Inline Semantic Elements
mark
time
meter
progress

Embedded Media
video
audio

We’ve all heard or even read one of the many O’Reilly Publishings, and now we can experience them like never before. The O’Reilly School of Technology has just opened up and offers many different courses and certificates to choose from for any level of learner.

The courses range from HTML/CSS all the way up to .Net and C#, with some Javascript, PHP, C, and VBscript in between, not to mention that’s only a portion of what is offered. Each course is 40 hours of work, and range from $298 USD to $498 USD for the more sophisticated languages. You can also bundle similiar courses together for a small discount and earn a certificate in that specified area.

O’Reilly has a great reputation behind them and this was an obvious step for them to take in offering online schooling to the masses, which is not only ingenious but quite affordable for them to do. Also, if your in the Illinois area, the University of Illinois and the O’Reilly School of Technology have partnered up to offer the Certificate of Professional Development by taking specific courses. This is a great opportunity for people that are out of school and want to refresh themselves in different areas.

I wouldn’t recommend this type of thing as a replacement for a local university or college which can often times be better for you.

If your at all interested in learning PHP, than I suggest starting in the one place that REALLY shows you how to properly write the most popular scripting language of the internet. PHP Video Tutorials are all done by LeighMac over at PHPNotepad and are a must for fun and actually making the language easy to learn.

There are currently 7 published tutorials and more to come, the first few going over the language, it’s syntax, and even setting up a text environment on your own Windows machine, to the last few going over functions, and MySQL connections. I really enjoy watching them, learning little tricks I didn’t know about, and listening to his pretty funny commentary.

Check them out, and let him know what you think.

Alright, so I’m working on a PHP/MySQL Content Management System (CMS), to integrate into some future website ventures, as well for any easier way for my clients to edit there own sites. I’ve been putting together the basics all today and have functional, but very bland CMS that doesn’t have any features whatsoever.

Here is where you come in, expecially you bloggers, who use CMS everyday. I would like to know what types of features that you would like to see that other CMS’s have, and even features that don’t exist yet. Let me know.

Short Post….

10 Tips That Every PHP Newbie Should Know

End Post…

Alright, so I was digging stories at Digg.com, as I always do, and I just happened to find myself in the programming section, as some of you know I’m a junior programmer of sorts. I was digging and reading stories, and I came accross this interesting website called Just Explain, I began reading, and all I can say is WOW.

Just Explain is trying to revolutionize the way that we know programming today, by allowing it to be done in plain english. Here is a snippet from the site, which I highly suggest you visit, and read some of the articles, especially if your a programmer.

Stop ‘coding’.
Instead ‘explain’ in English and create software.

Programming has always been complex and time consuming, requiring skill and training. On top of that, there is the need to constantly learn and be in touch with the constantly changing languages, standards and practices (and hypes). In the end, most time in software development is spent for the donkey work and only a fraction is truly used for the ‘art’ of programming.

Just Explain is a technology for eliminating the donkey work and bringing programming very close to being an ‘art’. This will unleash the true power of programming, not only for the programmers, but also for end users.

Just Explain uses plain English to ‘explain’ the scenarios, requirements and solutions to create functional software. In doing so, it eliminates the unnecessary donkey work involved in programming and allows focussing on the the real value adding work and ‘art’ of programming. The focus on the seamless use of natural language from requirements right upto code and its direct translation to software also makes it closer to the end user who can use it flexibly without the need for rigorous training.

In April 2006, you will see a demo of this technology. Watch this space!!!

I almost crapped myself when I read through the site, it’s just incredible, and I’m very excited for it.

For those of you wanting to learn a little bit of ASP, I have compiled some links that I used in my days of trying to find the better tutorials, and from my own experience, I’ve received the best tutorials was a place called w3schools.com. Check them out, they have tutorials on almost everything.

-> ASP
-> ASP.Net
-> VBScript

I’ll be writing a basic tutorials fairly soon on this.