PHP5 Bootcamp at Big Nerd Ranch
I’ve been programming in PHP for about 3 years now, almost all self-taught and book-based. I’d come from 9 years in the graphics industry and was ready to move into something new. My then seemingly disastrous 8 month unemployment provided ample opportunity to start picking up PHP since I’d just installed Mac OS X. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in that the past 3 jobs I’ve had since then have all given me almost complete autonomy to build tools and continue my heuristic path for programming.
All last week I was an hour outside of Atlanta, Georgia at Historic Banning Mills for Big Nerd Ranch’s PHP5 Bootcamp with David Sklar. It was extremely enlightening. It was exactly the level of instruction I was ready for. I’ve been looking at code from phpclasses and SourceForge, which have all been really really helpful in jumpstarting my understanding of how PHP can work. I’d been hitting a wall with some of the code I was looking at. I knew somewhat about PEAR, that it was akin to like.. CPAN for Perl (which I’ve never worked with)… but I never got into what the modules did.
David’s class dove deep into object oriented programming by about the 2.5 day mark and stayed there for the rest of the week. So, it was extremely helpful to learn about OOP, and learn the differences between how PHP4 implemented it (poorly) and how PHP5 implements is (much better, apparently).
Then we got an introduction into PEAR HTML_QuickForms. Beings as I work in PHP, I do a lot of forms. If you do any PHP work, you probably do too. David explained in the right amount of detail for the time we had how it works and where to get more information afterwards. During the example code time where the other classmates were working on a problem David gave to them to try to solve with this new stuff, I was working on retrofitting the stuff we use every day on our site. I had a fair amount of success converting all the manual error-checking and HTML table code I’ve figured out with the sleek code that HTML_QuickForms employs. I’m not 100% sure we’ll go back and redo all the code I’ve already done, but I can tell you, I’m moving over to this method when we move forward. Object Oriented, definitely.
Next up was Pear DB. This OO module provides an abstracted database connectivity layer that is DB platform agnostic. This isn’t necessarily such a big deal for us. We’re pretty much set in stone on MySQL right now. But, I’ll try to incorporate it moving forward, too.
We covered a lot of other really great things that either reinforced what I’ve surmised on my own, or pointed me to things that we can do on our servers to massively improve performance and start caching files on a server-wide basis. I’d already figured out how to cache the DB-intensive table code on some of our pages, but this method employs an extremely smart hash-checking mechanism. It’s definitely on my list of things to check into and configure our servers for.
All in all, PHP5 Bootcamp at Big Nerd Ranch was everything I’d hoped it would be. The people I met there were all really great. The BNR staff was very nice and helpful. The facilities were really awesome, and I got some really really nice photos of the facilities.
