This course covers many of the same topics as both the PHP I: Foundations and PHP II: Higher Structures classes but at an accelerated rate with special emphasis on the differences between PHP and other commonly used languages.

The next session of the course starts on April 29th and will last through May 16th. There will be nine sessions during that time for two hours at a time. You can get full details, including how to reserve your spot, on the course's page on the Zend website.

The update to the pagination tutorial includes a bit broader scope of functionality - mainly allowing for pagination from database results and how to be sure you're not dropping any additional query string variables included in the script (always a good thing).

The Ajax tutorial goes through just the basics - how to create and make the connection to a background PHP script. They also give a more "real world" example than just a "hello world", a script that can handle two types of requests, one of which is a call to a database to return results back to the script.

There are many web calendars in the market but some of them are quite complicated. If we are not able to understand the code, it becomes harder for us to customize the calendar to fit into our existing application. As such, we need to create a calendar that can plug itself into any system seamlessly without problems.

They show the creation of a calendar that can be used by including one line into the app and integrates easily into whatever style the website might be using. They give the code for building the calendar and to add dates to it on the server-side with PHP. The Ajax comes in when they make a call to the script in the background, requesting the next/previous month's output and pushing it into a local div.

This is just a quick tip. If you have a bunch of data that you need to concatenate, take a look at MySQL's GROUP_CONCAT function.

For example, way back when, I wrote about (and subsequently weighting those tags) to an application. It was a very simple approach with each record having a tags field. It was just a simple text field and I stored all the tags with spaces. However, to pull out a list of all tags being used in the system, I returned the tags field from all records, looped through each record, exploding the tags onto an array.

Using the group_concat() function already in MySQL, he was able to reduce looping through his data, splitting on the spaces down to a single line call in SQL telling it to concatinate spaces. He includes the code (just a few lines) to get the job done.

The tool integrates its results with your existing WordPress installation to make for quick and easy layout editing without you having to know a single bit of PHP, HTML, or CSS. The interface allows you to drag and drop elements into place and includes a plugin system to make for easy enhancements down the line.

This article will examine the primary sorting algorithms with code examples, and some empirical data regarding how they perform in relation to one another, as well as the size of the data set in question.

We will also create a function to fill up our collection with random data in order to test the sort algorithms with a sufficiently large data set. The sort algorithms listed above are the ones that every computer science student learns in college and are the primary sort algorithms found in real-world applications.

The sorting styles they cover include: bubble sort, heap sort, merge sort, quick sort, and shell sort. For each, they provide the code, making it a simple matter of cut and paste to make it work in your script. There's not a whole lot of documentation going along with the code in this article, but the sorting code is simple enough to understand without it.]]> Wed, 05 Apr 2006 07:13:17 -0500