Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
For today's PHP developer there is only one way to code a connection to a database: PDO, an access abstraction layer that is a common extension to the core. It works across different databases (MySQL, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, etc), is class-based, and is also fairly lightweight. If a developer wants an…
Working directly with the database is something I rarely do any more with the applications I work with. Instead of creating a raw connection and pulling data directly, I usually utilize some sort of customized data layer. (If you don't know what a data layer is, imagine creating a PHP application…
Several months ago I wrote a blog post describing how to create a database class that would wrap the native php mysqli connection. You can read that post here. Since that post was written I've learned a lot about proper php classes and realized that I made several mistakes in that blog post that I'd…
For the last post in this short series on SQL I wanted to explain some more in-depth usage. A technique that I wish I would have started using in my early websites is a centralized script to handle all of my database calls. PHP does have some great functions built in to connect, read, and write…
While the last two posts focused heavily on theory and fundamentals of SQL it's time to start on the actual usage. There's a ton of good tutorials out there that skip right to the code, but as a young developer, I wasn't convinced that SQL was a worthwhile tool until I was forced to use it. I wanted…
In my last post, I introduced some of the basic ideas of data storage and how I came to realize that SQL would be a great solution to my content handling problems. Now I'd like to walk through some of the more advanced concepts and start going through some basic uses. There's plenty of great…
I like to think of myself as a practical web developer. With no true formal training, most of what I use to make my web sites is self-taught. Instead of trying to apply what I learned in a classroom into an online project, I went out and learned what I needed to get a project done. This allowed me…
I started learning about web development during the summer of 2006 when I took an undergraduate course at Michigan Tech involving basic xHTML and CSS. My professor was very strict on certain coding points, such as using valid, clean xHTML and the separation of content and style, which I still…