by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

This week’s book giveaway

This Friday I will be giving away the second (technically 4th and 5th) copies of my book “You want to do WHAT with PHP?” The rules still apply; if you win I will ask you to cover shipping costs. See one of my previous posts on what that looks like.

So, to win

Tweet this posting. I will change it up a little and say that it needs to contain the bit.ly link for this page. I will make the drawing based off of who bit.ly says has tweeted it. The ywtdwwphp hashtag was a little wierd.

Become a fan of my Facebook page and Like this posting. The Like will be how you will be entered. But remember, the winner will be asked to cover shipping costs.

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Getting good PHP programmers

One of the interesting conversations I had during Zendcon was while talking to a recruiter. She asked what questions she could ask to help guage how strong a PHP developer is. The best one I could come up with was “name 6 of the 10 variable types in PHP”. I’ve had the pleasure of being able to interview several people for working at Zend and that is usually one of the first questions I ask and I can usually get a good feel for how long the conversation will be after that. It’s an esoteric question but by asking it I can guage a) how well that person knows PHP, and b) how easy it will be for me to work with them. If they know the answer (and correct it) they know their PHP. If they don’t know the answer but get flustered or angered by it, then they will probably be harder to work with.

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

@DragonBe is awesome

After I posted my slides for use by user groups Michelango van Dam of PHPBenelux posted on the Zend Facebook page that people could use his too. They are CC-licensed so you are free to use them as well. So I asked if he could provide the PPT versions so I could post the full deal for people and he agreed. So here are three presentations that Michelangelo did that you can use for your user group as well.

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Read first, then tweet, for a free book

A few weeks ago I blogged that I was going to give away 9 copies of my book, You want to do WHAT with PHP? Well, today is the day to start. There are a few ways you can win.

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Free slides for user group meetings

One of the problems I have heard that user groups have had is that it is quite difficult to get content. Some of the larger, or more active ones, may not have as much of a problem with this but a lot of the smaller ones that I’ve talked to do. So what I’ve decided to do is, in effect, open source a lot of my presentations for re-use at user groups. What that means is that if you are looking for content specifically for a user group feel free to use some of my stuff to help you along. No warranty or support will be supplied, and they are provided “as-is”. What that means is that if you see something on there that is weird or perhaps even “wrong” I was probably using it as a keyword or reminder for something I wanted to say. So, if I wrote something that was spot-on, it was intended, if I wrote something that was wrong or inaccurate, I was trying to prove a point. It’s called nuance. 🙂

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Zendcon coming up

I had just tweeted something about Zendcon; how there were so many good sessions that it sucks that attendees have to choose between so many good ones. I mean, look at the sessions that immediately follow the keynote on Tuesday.

Integrating PHP with RabbitMQ – Alvaro Videla

A new approach to object persistence in PHP – Stefan Priebsch

The State of SOAP in PHP – David Zuelke

Advanced Date/Time Handling with PHP – Derick Rethans

Documents, documents, documents – Matthew Weier O’Phinney

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

You want to do WHAT with PHP? GIVEAWAY

I just got my copies of my book “You want to do WHAT with PHP?” today. During my conversations with MCPress, my publisher, I had asked for 3 copies to do a social media promotion and they agreed. I posted that I would be giving away 3 copies on Twitter and got a whole bunch of “I WANTS”. So I asked my publisher for more copies to give away and they agreed to another 6. So that is a total of 9 copies I have avaialble to give away.

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Your favorite PHP sites (based off of Facebook responses)

Earlier today I had asked on the Zend Facebook page “what is your favorite page for getting PHP-based information?” There were some good answers there so I figured that I would post those answers here (since it’s all public information anyways).

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

PHP 5.3 Certification Beta Testers Needed

Zend has recently teamed up with several of the top people in the PHP community to offer the PHP 5.3 Certification. It will be coming out in a few months, but before we can do that we need beta testers. That means YOU! If you want to participate all you need to do is fill out a quick qualification survey. Everyone who takes the survey can take the final certification at a discounted rate! Even if you aren’t chosen for the beta! These are the questions you will be asked (fill them out on the link, not on this page).

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Why I don’t think type-hinted foreach loops are a good idea

There was a Twitter poll going around this morning that I thought was kind of interesting and got me thinking. It asked whether or not type-hinting in a foreach loop would be a good idea. The argument was that the same arguments that go for have type hinting in functions/methods apply to loops. Those reasons would primarily be structure. Having a more rigid structure means that the likelihood of a runtime error is lessened to a much greater degree. I agree with this statement, but I don’t think that it applies to loops. And here’s why.

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