Archive for Web Development
February 10, 2008 at 9:24 pm · Filed under Ajax, Tutorial, Web Development
Recently came across several tutorials that explained AJAX very well.
Jon Hughes over at Phazm.com has written a great tutorial called Easy as Pie - Ajax Requests. I believe this is the 2nd in Jon’s Easy as Pie series, if you liked the Ajax Requests Tutorial, then also check out Easy as Pie - Unobtrusive Javascript, another great tutorial. I find Jon explans things great in his tutorials (line by line in the Ajax tutorial) and it would be easy for a Newb to pick up.
Couple others worth checking out :
You can’t go wrong with any tutorials at W3Schools, if you want to learn any programming Web-Wise, W3Schools is the absolute best place to start. They have been around forever, and I think I even learning my beginner HTML and ASP from them. The have a great AJAX Tutorial of course.
AJAX:Getting Started over at the Mozilla Developer Center
Found this one through Google, I thought it was nicely layed out, and easy to understand check out this AJAX PDF Tutorial
And a couple more from the Freaks over at AjaxFreaks.com, these are 5 beginner level AJAX tutorials for various functions on a website : Simple Introduction to AJAX and XMLHttpRequest, Creating Live Data with AJAX, Practical Usage For AJAX: Random Image Block, Multiple Dynamic DIV Tags with AJAX, Making a Google Suggest-like application.
January 15, 2008 at 1:03 pm · Filed under Tutorial, Web Development
If you have ever been frustrated trying to find just the right color for a webpage or image you are working on, these next couple of links are for you.
I found an excellent FREE Advanced HTML Color Picker which is pretty amazing. It lets you add a small icon or text link to the website so that you can see right off the bat if the color you are picking is good. A small unobtrusive box opens up with sliders and such that let you change the colors, and you can see the color changing before your eyes. Great little app, and easy to install into you webpage.
A couple of other posts from ColourLovers.com that I found usefull are : 32 Common Color Names for Easy Reference and Ultimate HTML Color Hex Code List.
After digging into the site a bit, besides the post links above, I believe ColourLovers.com is an all round excellent resource for choosing colors. They let there users create Color Palettes and Patterns and even provide you downloads in several different formats (PS, HTML, etc.) If you click on a Color Palette for example a page will load up showing you the particular Color Palette, and then breaks down each color with HEX and RGB code. This site is great. You could find a nice Palette and have all the HEX and RGB codes you need to make up a website with.
I made a small Web Safe Colors page myself a long long time ago which I would keep on my desk when ever I was developing a website.
December 12, 2007 at 10:42 pm · Filed under Ruby on Rails, Tutorial
If you are like me, and you are wondering what all the hype is about
Ruby on Rails is, you should visit the
Akita on Rails Website. I admit that I have not read much about it, but I did install it, and created a small database driven website. It was very cool because I basically created the whole thing with very few lines of code. But that is as far as I got.
Version 2.0 was released recently, and there are already a lot of great tutorials popping up around the net. Akita has done a couple of great tutorials, and a screencast that is done very well, and will help you understand RoR. These articles are geared toward people who already know Rails 1.2, so if you are just a beginner looking to start out, this is not a good place to start.
Akita on Rails Screencast
Rolling with Rails 2.0 - The First Full Tutorial - Part 1
Rolling with Rails 2.0 - The First Full Tutorial - Part 2
December 11, 2007 at 2:00 pm · Filed under PHP, Tutorial
Thank goodness it is close to Christmas, as this is the time of year to recieve some great gifts, with one coming to us from
Kore Nordmann. He wrote a series of articles (great reads, check the links below) for Image Creation with PHP, they will teach you about Bitmaps, Vector Graphics, Libraries and Image Formats, and tools for image creation.
The Image Creation with PHP are broken up into several posts, here is a direct link to all the topics.
Format and Libraries
A first shape
Gradient rendering
Integrating bitmaps
Text rendering
Image Tools
December 7, 2007 at 12:02 am · Filed under PHP, Tutorial
Found a great article on
i-Hack.org regarding
Searching Google Like An Expert and although I knew a lot of the commands the Author Zeus talks about, I honestly really never used them with Google, opting to be lazy and just type in what I am looking for.
After reading the article, I decided to try it out, and find some PHP Tutorials, but I didn’t want web pages, I just wanted to search for PDF’s, so I typed this simple query in the Google Search Bar -> PHP Tutorial filetype:pdf
Seems simple enough, and bingo, I got tonnes of good PHP Tutorial PDF’s, awesome. I should use some of these techniques more often.
Below is a couple links to PHP Tutorial PDF’s that popped up from my search :
PHP Handout
PHP Advanced Tutorial
PHP Programming
There are tonnes more, try it out and let us know if you find a great tutorial.
December 6, 2007 at 2:20 pm · Filed under PHP, Tutorial
As you may have read in previous posts, I am a Newbie in PHP, although I do have a C/C++ background, I think should be easier for me to get into PHP. I have an idea of an Online MMO (text based) that I want to create (ala WW2GAME.NET) but before I start, I want to make sure I read up plenty on PHP.
One area of development that people sometimes forget (besides Commenting well) is Testing. This is were I ran across this great article An Introduction to the Art of Unit Testing in PHP.
The article makes mention of the main reasons why testing usually takes a back seat to development, mainly it is major boring compared to the rest of the production of developing. The author gives several examples of the types of Unit testing, then goes on to give you a bunch of benefits for Unit testing. My favorite being, Unit Testing is Fun =) I think the author will have a difficult time convincing us of that, but you can’t argue with the points made in the article. Unit Testing will save you lots of time in the end, and keep bugs out of production. Which is what we all want in the end.
December 5, 2007 at 1:51 pm · Filed under PHP, Tutorial
I am a beginner at PHP, I know C and C++, so I can read PHP pretty well, but I am still having some difficulty starting PHP from scratch. I have been searching the Net for a couple of good sites, and I will mention a couple I have found over the next couple of days.
First great site I found (was on the DIGG front page, so shouldn’t be hard for others to find as well) is TalkPHP. I like there example tutorials so far, the way they are layed out, the way they explain the language, then give examples to back up there explanation.
A couple of interesting reads if you are a Newbie to PHP are -> Defining your World - All About Constants , Generating a Range of Numbers the Easy Way, The Dangers of the Header Function , Securing your MySQL Queries with Sprintf plus there are tonnes more.
The site is layed out in forum style, but unlike other forums, the good information is not buried deep in thousands of posts. They display the latest Articles on the front page, plus have a Articles Menu, and it is split up into several Categories. You will even find the Top 10 Articles listed in the Articles Menu.
If that was not enough, there is also a Glossary, so you can click on a letter and find the definition of the PHP functions, plus an example.
I am glad I found this site, it will help me tremendously with learning PHP, and I hope it helps you as well.
December 3, 2007 at 10:09 am · Filed under PHP, Tutorial
Although it is easier I think for someone to transition who already know C/C++ to move to PHP, there are still a lot of pitfalls one might encounter on there road to PHP Uberness.
I found this little tutorial called From C/C++ to PHP by Alexey Smirnov. Alexey discusses some interesting topics such as Avoiding references misuse, Object construction and Regular Expressions.
Another good read is by a user called cable_guy_67 which shows you code by code comparisons of what it would look like in C++ and then PHP. Check out Porting Code from C++ to PHP.
On the opposite side, I also found an interesting tool that translates PHP to C++, you can find the source of the tool on The PHP to C++ Translation tool page, and check out the PHP2CPP Feature Summary page to see what the tool can do for you.
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