PHP

As you may know, I am the author and maintainer of the PHP League's CommonMark Markdown parser. This project has three primary goals: fully support the entire CommonMark spec match the behavior of the JS reference implementation be well-written and super-extensible so that others can add their own functionality. This last goal is perhaps the most challenging, especially from a performance perspective. Other popular Markdown parsers are built using single classes with massive regex functions. As you can see from this benchmark, it makes them lightning fast: Library Avg. Parse Time File/Class Count Parsedown 1.6.0 2 ms 1 PHP Markdown 1.5.0 4 ms 4 PHP Markdown Extra 1.5.0 7 ms 6 CommonMark 0.12.0 46 ms 117 Unfortunately, because of the tightly-coupled design and overall architecture, it's dif...

You know that a fast site == happier users, improved ranking from Google, and increased conversions. Maybe you even think your WordPress site is as fast as it can be: you've looked at site performance, from the best practices of setting up a server, to troubleshooting slow code, and offloading your images to a CDN, but is that everything? With dynamic, database-driven websites like WordPress, you might still have one problem on your hands: database queries slowing down your site. In this post, I’ll take you through how to identify the queries causing bottlenecks, how to understand the problems with them, along with quick fixes and other approaches to speed things up. I’ll be using an actual query we recently tackled that was slowing things down on the customer portal of deliciousbrains.c...

PHP is probably the best web app development language out there today for a bunch of reason technical, and market oriented. But it’s not the only language out there and it doesn’t have a monopoly of good programming. Comparing Programming Languages An important lessons that my 20+ years of programming experience has taught me, is that one of the best ways to learn one programming language, is to learn another! By learning different programming languages, you will start to gain deeper insights about your first programming language. Here is the key point, most modern programming languages share about 98% of the same principles and language constructs. That said, each language has their own subtle take on how they do things. So for example, PHP creates functions with this code: function...

I am excited to announce our upcoming Python course: Powerful Python 3. A beginners course covering Python 3, students go from an absolute neophyte, to having a working knowledge of object oriented Python.  Course is based on Python 3.6. StudioWeb course details: In addition to a set of comprehensive and engaging videos, Power Python 3 will include quizzing, code challenges, and gamification that is provided by the StudioWeb app. Your students will learn Python easily, and they will have fun too! Each video lesson is supported by 4-5 quiz questions, that are made up of both code challenges and multiple choice questions. All our courses leverage the recursive spiral teaching method that helps us to achieve great outcomes with students. Professor’s Dream: From a professor’s perspecti...

After nearly 7 years of working with schools, it seems clear to me that the best way to teach code, is with an open ended lesson plan. Here’s why: Learners will learn at different speeds Different schools have different schedules Rigid lesson plans will inventively break Overly rigid lesson plans can easily be derailed … I hear about it all the time. Once that happens, teachers are scrambling to get things back on track. The other approach is to use a flexible lesson plan that allows for variability in the classroom: Student misses a few days. Student is talented and moving fast Student is struggling and needs more time School gets cancelled a few days for whatever reasons … A curriculum designed for reality Instead of a set of highly structured lesson plans that can b...

One of the reasons PHP is a good language to teach server side programming with, is because it is relatively easy to setup a PHP environment on each student’s workstation. With free apps like MAMP and WAMP, you can install a fully functional PHP installation with MySQL, Apache and it comes with an easy to use control panel to manage the servers. With this 1-click install running, students will be able to explore concepts like: web servers database servers http directory and how it impact server side code processing … And more. StudioWeb’s interactive PHP courses teach not only the fundamentals of programming, we also have included key project based courses (crud with PHP, PHP tag cloud) that allow students to see PHP used in a real-world programming context. Teachers benefit f...

I’ve been writing code since 1994, and have used many programming languages over the years to build commercial apps. Thought PHP was NOT my favorite language, years ago, I came to respect the pragmatic and effective nature of the PHP universe. From day one, with PHP, you just got things done fast. PHP sucks! PHP is old! Funny, PHP is the programming world’s whipping boy. People have been disparaging the language for years and years. And yet, like Rocky Balboa, it just keeps on coming and winning! PHP now powers more websites than any other server side programming language … some estimates say nearly 80%! Consider that the 3 most popular CMS’ are built with PHP (WordPress, Drupal and Joomla) … it stands to reason. Contrast that to the once darling of the nerd-hipster programming wor...