The following screencast is a little intro to what PHP is. It will discuss some of the common things that PHP can do for web designers and explain a little about how it works when interacting with databases. This will just be a short intro, as PHP can do a lot more when it comes to more advanced features, but these will be slightly more common examples that you are using even while reading this blog post.
Screencast Link
Showing posts with label PHP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PHP. Show all posts
MediaWiki book report
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Mediawiki, published by O’Reilly Media is a wonderful book to read if you are just starting out and learning how to use the Mediawiki software. In my opinion, it doesn’t seem to help a lot for the more advanced users who already know how to set up a basic wiki. The book covers three main topics. The first part is a general overview of what wikis are, and how to use one. The second is a more in depth reading on how to edit articles, organize pages and use templates. It’s basically more code centered than the last part. The final section is for people who want to make their own wiki, or be the administrator. It talks about installing the wiki on your website, doing maintenance and bug fixes, and overall controlling users and group.
I know a fair bit about wikis since I am active in one for a game I play, but I still have been able to find this book real handy. A lot of the editing basics and template usage has been memorized, but some of the things not used often like transcluded pages, using short urls, and editing the overall layout of the wiki so it is not default, tend to be for non basic users and the book acts as a quick reference guide with an organized table of contents. The weak points behind the book however are its lack of thorough details when describing how to do some things. For instance, under the index, under ‘Bots’, there’s a page that it says is “Creating a Bot”, but on the page it is only a brief 2 short paragraphs that talk about what the API is and it gives you a link to a site that talks about how they work but it never explains the step by step guide on how to make one. It also talks about some extensions (Parserfunctions, and DPL) which are really handy for a wiki. Although, it doesn’t explain that these aren’t part of the package that you download so you have to download them separately. All in all, the book explains the basic to semi-basic features pretty thoroughly, but is a little lacking when explaining something more advanced. It is to be expected since the book doesn’t have a big bunch of pages that it could have had.
One of the strong points of this Mediawiki book is that it doesn’t just give you a few numbered steps saying, “Do this, then do that, then do this and it should work.” The book explains what some features are, gives you examples and shows you what the result will be. It teaches you the background to editing something so you know how it works vs. how to just implement something knowing nothing about it. After reading this book, I feel like it would be beneficial, if you’re going to continue using mediawiki, to look at other more in depth books about Mediawiki and Wikis in general. Hopefully they might explain some of the things that this book has lacked.
I know a fair bit about wikis since I am active in one for a game I play, but I still have been able to find this book real handy. A lot of the editing basics and template usage has been memorized, but some of the things not used often like transcluded pages, using short urls, and editing the overall layout of the wiki so it is not default, tend to be for non basic users and the book acts as a quick reference guide with an organized table of contents. The weak points behind the book however are its lack of thorough details when describing how to do some things. For instance, under the index, under ‘Bots’, there’s a page that it says is “Creating a Bot”, but on the page it is only a brief 2 short paragraphs that talk about what the API is and it gives you a link to a site that talks about how they work but it never explains the step by step guide on how to make one. It also talks about some extensions (Parserfunctions, and DPL) which are really handy for a wiki. Although, it doesn’t explain that these aren’t part of the package that you download so you have to download them separately. All in all, the book explains the basic to semi-basic features pretty thoroughly, but is a little lacking when explaining something more advanced. It is to be expected since the book doesn’t have a big bunch of pages that it could have had.
One of the strong points of this Mediawiki book is that it doesn’t just give you a few numbered steps saying, “Do this, then do that, then do this and it should work.” The book explains what some features are, gives you examples and shows you what the result will be. It teaches you the background to editing something so you know how it works vs. how to just implement something knowing nothing about it. After reading this book, I feel like it would be beneficial, if you’re going to continue using mediawiki, to look at other more in depth books about Mediawiki and Wikis in general. Hopefully they might explain some of the things that this book has lacked.
PHP
Monday, March 1, 2010
Otherwise known as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, is by far one of the most useful languages out there. There's practically no limit to the number of things it can do. For instance, using this blog deals with PHP. You would enter information like a blog title, and description and once you hit submit, the information is all stored in a database. The database is basically a giant table where you got different columns for things like "post number", "post title", "date of posting", "labels", etc. You could even create your own blog, quite simply from scratch. You would have to do this is you get the teacher Amir Khawaja for a GRC276 class.
The most important thing to learn, besides the codes to use, is how to use it. If you know how it will gather the information and display it, the job is half done. For the blog example, you would have these steps to understand:
1. Knowing how the information input gets stored in the database
2. Knowing how to read / access the information in the database
3. Knowing how to display the information that has been read / accessed
If you understand how something will do it's job, finding the code in a book, or online can easily be done. Then if you encounter an error, you know how it should work and can (sometimes) simply solve it.
The most important thing to learn, besides the codes to use, is how to use it. If you know how it will gather the information and display it, the job is half done. For the blog example, you would have these steps to understand:
1. Knowing how the information input gets stored in the database
2. Knowing how to read / access the information in the database
3. Knowing how to display the information that has been read / accessed
If you understand how something will do it's job, finding the code in a book, or online can easily be done. Then if you encounter an error, you know how it should work and can (sometimes) simply solve it.
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