The last couple of weeks have been quite the experience for me. I was part of a big layoff at my former company, which was interesting. I've never been in that position before, and it's hard not to take it personally. [...] Before the face-to-face portion, I chatted with the owner and head programmer on a conference call, and they ended up sending me a technical assessment quiz.

In the quiz, there was one question the prompted him to come up with his tips - ten things that you can do to keep your code clean, lean and easy to maintain. His tips include things like "use single-quotes around array indexes", "don't use open short tags" and "document your code". Some of the suggestions don't make that much of a difference, but others (like the documentation one) can make the world of difference down the line.

As you can see [below], we already got some examples and hope that everybody who ordered in advance got their examples by now, too. If you don't, stay tuned they should arrive soonish. We are both absolutely amazed by the printing quality and the overall impression of the book.

To win your own copy of the book (German) head over to this quiz page on the DynamicWebPages.de website and answer three simple questions.

My good friend Avigail was kind enough to cough up some copies of Zend Studio and even a license for Zend Guard. [...] We've got a quiz (No, not a survey, a quiz!) to test your mad Zend Studio skillz. If you don't have said skillz, I'd suggest downloading the Free 30 Day Trial of Zend Studio and develop them.

Once you are a Studio-Fu master, take the quiz by clicking on this link.

First prize is a Zend Studio perpetual license + Zend Guard annual license, second prize (3 winners) are licenses for Zend Studio Professional, and third prize winners (200 winners) get a 50% off coupon for a purchase of Zend Studio.

If you need a little explanation on the PHP Security Quiz by Mayflower, just read the extended entry. Just as a quick hint for the answers, I decided to blog about which answer is right - and why.

There's only four questions to the quiz, but it's good that he explains each. Some of them, especially dealing with regular expressions and Javascript attacks need a bit of explanation.

For those that couldn't make it out to the conference, here's the questions that match up with those answers.