Upcoming Events

• KCITP Presents Hack the Midwest - June 15-16th, 2013
• Lawrence Coders Hack Day - July 11, 2013
• Nomad PHP (virtual) – Rob Allen, ZF2 – May 22 @ 8:00 pm
• Hack Kansas City June 1-2, National Day of Civic Hacking  ( KcMo Data API’s )

• 1 million cups KC - Kauffman Labs – Great networking resource, meets weekly
• Venture Friday’s at Red Nova, meets monthly

Major Updates in the PHP world:

• Google App Engine now supports PHP - Running PHP 5.4, APC, memcache, etc!
• PHP Support in Engine Yard Cloud announced at #tec13
• PHP 5.5.0 RC 0
• PHP 5.4.15 and 5.3.25

We had lots of great conversations that didn’t necessarily have a “link” to go along with it.  If you didn’t go, you should have been there!  If you did thanks for the great discussions!!

If you have things you want to make sure people know, be sure to add it to the comments below!

Right from the start, the authors assure PHP was created for web development, and continues to be a powerful tool for constructing your latest ideas. The tone is generally pragmatic, and doesn’t go wandering off into some advanced topic before you are ready.  The first couple of chapters are about getting you hooked…showing new developers how easy it is to get started with the language. From there, they go into writing your own functions and diving into string manipulation.

PHP is rarely developed in a vacuum away from all of the other libraries, frameworks, micro-frameworks and whatnot that make it such an effective platform.  However, to avoid over complicating the topics, Programming PHP generally stays true to discussing “vanilla php” until you get into the later chapters.

The section of the Strings chapter on using regular expressions is easily worth the price of the book on it’s own, but they smartly introduce you to the more traditional string processing techniques first.

The chapters on Objects and Arrays are equally powerful, drawing on the previous chapters and going into just enough conceptual and concrete detail to be highly effective.

At this point, you are going to have a very rich understanding of the language, but haven’t seen much of how to actually build a web application in a while.  So, they take a chapter to do just–explaining exactly how you will can use html, forms and sessions to get data to and from your users.  Finally, they give a taste of the many types of database engines php supports directly including PDO, mysqli and even MongoDB!  So just half way though the book, and you have everything you need to truly be effective at building web applications.

From there, look forward to some fun with generating graphics and PDFs   Heck, there is even a 13 line script that converts images into color ascii art!

All PHP developers should read and understand the chapters on Security and Application Techniques–if just to keep these concepts in their minds while coding.  Developers who have been using PHP since the early days may find the sections on Web Services and Dates and Times particularly useful.

The book includes a giant appendix — essentially a concise manual for the language.  While many of us probably use the online docs, I remember this section being particularly useful when I was learning PHP from the first edition of this book over a decade ago.

Web development is a very large and constantly evolving field.  This book doesn’t try to make points diving into HTML 5, CSS 3 or writing complicated map-reduce functions in MongoDB–nor should it.  I would have liked to see a chapter on PHPUnit or any of the PHP QA tools–even if it replaced the chapter on fpdf.  Also, the Application Techniques showed how to build a simple template engine to introduce the concept–I would have liked to seen a simple MVC pattern demonstrated as well.

Regardless, the authors have done an amazing job of refreshing this iconic reference for the PHP language. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about PHP.

Please take a few moments and fill out this great survey John put together for us. It’s only one page– 10 simple questions–that will help us get a better understanding of what our PHP Development community is looking for.

Our Quick, 3 minute survey!
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KYW6Z5V

Thank you for your time!

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I wanted to thank our new friends at Red Nova Labs for hosting our meeting in October!  We will still be meeting at 2:30pm on the third Saturday, but this time in the city of Westwood!

They have generously agreed to open their doors to us–even for our usual Saturday time slot! Just park in the lot across 49th street, walk in the front door and down the steps–you can’t miss it!

Be sure to check this website or the meetup page in the months to come for details on our meeting location.

Things we are looking for:

• Relaxed, inviting atmosphere for presentations and conversations.
• Busy places are ok, but need to have a place we can schedule out or better–claim our time recurring slot.
• Central location for at least Downtown KC, Lawrence, Leawood, Olathe, etc (preferably with high way access.
• Air Conditioning (I know, right?) – again, comfortable environment
• More “hangout” less “classroom” – But, a projector or a place to project are a must.
• Great WiFi is a plus!
• sponsored/office locations, will be fine too.

If you have any ideas, please discuss in the comments below or just send them from our meetup link below.

http://www.meetup.com/kcphpug/suggestion/

Brian Geraghty gave a great, in-depth talk on techniques you can use while developing your software to improve it’s security.  These aren’t just the “usual” linup either.  Personally, I’ve used his trim($s) === ” trick at least a dozen times since I saw this.  Be sure to check it out if you missed it, and check his “Part 2″ in September!

I did my best to fill in for @johnkary this month.  PHP Features, framework releases, free skill building opportunities, and more.  This month, in “Last Month in PHP.”

http://bryan.ravensight.org/2012/07/why-i-choose-php/

Bryan is preparing a series of PHP Security focused talks for KC PUG, so certainly check it out.