Ed Finkler’s profile

Others have recommended Stoyan's patterns book, which is quite good once you get the basics down.

I tend to disagree with folks who suggest Crockford's book as the first thing to read. He makes a lot of good points, but he's opinionated to a fault, imho. A beginner will not be in a position to critically assess his arguments.

Eloquent JavaScript is a good start. I think the Mozilla Core JavaScript Reference and Guide stuff are solid too.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Guide

Posted in Learning JavaScript.

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 at 18:35:55 GMT

Hate to come late and just third a recommendation, but Charles has been invaluable to me when developing desktop RIAs. Very nice tool.

Posted in Inspecting and Hacking HTTP.

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 at 01:59:44 GMT

People are very, very confused by this, Chris. 8D

Posted in My First CSS Naked Day.

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 at 21:02:25 GMT

"Andi, of course you are right, but not every database system enjoyes prepared statements support on PHP :-("

My understanding is that prepared statements are at least emulated in every PDO driver. I asked Wez Furlong whether the emulated prepared statements were "safe" from SQL injection at OSCON 2006, and he said they were. Obviously this is PHP5 only, but... perhaps another good reason to make the jump. 8)

Posted in addslashes() Versus mysql_real_escape_string().

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 at 17:16:57 GMT

"A shiver passes down your spine as you realize that there must be some pretty bad “bad stuff” out there to warrant this library passing the crazy crap politics that is PEAR."

Shit, you know that, though. This is PHP: the power to heal, the power to kill, in the hands of a dork.

But I stand by my statement that there are some very well-done libraries in PEAR, and for quite a while it was the first and best place to look for solid components to build your web apps on. That situation has changed quite a bit in the past 2-3 years, though, but it's not like PEAR is suddenly a turd floating in the bowl of PHP development.

Posted in Six Reasons PHP Sucks.

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 at 20:19:41 GMT

I enjoyed Theo's talk a lot, but I did think the shot at PEAR was beyond exaggeration for humor's sake and into the realm of unfounded criticism. The PEAR code I've used -- and I don't use a ton, but what I do use I use a *lot* -- seems pretty good to me, and certainly far above the level of stuff at phpclasses.org or the user-contributed notes in the php.net docs.

Posted in Six Reasons PHP Sucks.

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 at 15:08:38 GMT

I'm interested in the unit testing tutorial. I'm convinved to give it a try, but I've had some difficulty finding practical explanations for how you change your typical app dev process to integrate unit testing.

Posted in OSCON 2006.

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 at 04:37:35 GMT

Donkey, it looks like there's an implicit ob_start when you call this function. Also note that this function only modifies URLs that don't contains a protocol://domain, so if you use "full" URLs within your app, this won't work.

Posted in PHP Magazine December Issue.

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 at 05:13:55 GMT

I'm digging it. I think you should get up in dat.

Posted in PHP Podcast: Hot or Not?.

Thu, 26 May 2005 at 20:10:23 GMT

We're very happy to see the formation of the PHPSC. Hope you get some traffic from our reposting of the press release.

Good luck!

Posted in PHP Security Consortium Redux.

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 at 22:21:12 GMT