9 Useful PHP Functions and Features You Need to Know

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Even after using PHP for years, we stumble upon functions and features that we did not know about. Some of these can be very useful, yet underused. Not all of us have read the manual and the function reference from cover to cover!

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Advanced Regular Expression Tips and Techniques

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Regular Expressions are the Swiss Army knife for searching through information for certain patterns. They have a wide arsenal of tools, some of which often go undiscovered or underutilized. Today I will show you some advanced tips for working with regular expressions.

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CodeIgniter from Scratch: Day 13 – Extending the Framework

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In today’s screencast we are going to learn how to create our own helpers and libraries. We are also going to learn how to extend the existing helpers and libraries that come with CodeIgniter. At the end of the tutorial we will extend the Form Validation library to give it the ability to check for password strength.

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CodeIgniter from Scratch: Day 12 – Shopping Cart

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Today, we are going to take a look at the Shopping Cart library for CodeIgniter. This useful class allows us to add and remove items to a shopping cart, update them, and calculate prices. I will demonstrate how you can build a simple shopping cart system with the help of this library..

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CodeIgniter from Scratch: Day 11 – File Operations

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In today’s episode, we are going to be working with several helper functions, related to files, directories, and downloads. We are going to learn how to read, write, download files, and retrieve information about both files and directories. Also at the end we will build a small file browser that utilizes jQuery as well.

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CodeIgniter from Scratch: (Day 10) The Calendar Library

ci_from_scratchHere is my next screencast on CodeIgniter.

In this tenth episode of the CodeIgniter From Scratch screencast series, we will be exploring the Calendar library. We are also going to utilize the database class and jQuery AJAX. I will show you how to build a simple and CSS-styled calendar page, which will have the ability to store and display content for each day.

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CodeIgniter from Scratch: Day 9 – File Uploading and Image Manipulation

ci_from_scratch Nettuts+ published my next screencast on CodeIgniter.

In lesson nine of our CodeIgniter series, we’ll build a small image gallery that allows you to upload files, and automatically create thumbnails.

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CodeIgniter from Scratch: Day 8 – AJAX

ci_from_scratch Today Nettuts+ published my screencast on CodeIgniter.

The CodeIgniter from Scratch series was unexpectedly, and significantly popular. Today, I’m pleased to announce that, with the help of one of my best authors, Burak, we’ll be continuing the series! Additionally, the most often requested topic is the subject for today’s screencast: combining CodeIgniter and jQuery.

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CodeIgniter and Doctrine from scratch.
Day 11 – Record Hooks

Codeigniter Doctrine In this tutorial we will be looking into Doctrine Record Hooks. This will allow us to trigger certain actions in our Models.

We are going to use this feature to simplify a few things in the existing code, and even gain some performance benefits.

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Scheduling Tasks with Cron Jobs

previewCron Jobs are used for scheduling tasks to run on the server. They’re most commonly used for automating system maintenance or administration. However, they are also relevant to web application development. There are many situations when a web application may need certain tasks to run periodically. Today we are going to explore the fundamentals of Cron Jobs.

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SQL For Beginners: Part 3 – Database Relationships

preview Today, we continue our journey into the world of SQL and relational database systems. In this part three of the series, we’ll learn how to work with multiple tables that have relationships with each other. First, we will go over some core concepts, and then will begin working with JOIN queries in SQL.

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CodeIgniter and Doctrine from scratch.
Day 10 – Pagination

Codeigniter Doctrine Today we will be working on Pagination.

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Mastering cURL

preview cURL is a tool for transferring files and data with URL syntax, supporting many protocols including HTTP, FTP, TELNET and more. Initially, cURL was designed to be a command line tool. Lucky for us, the cURL library is also supported by PHP. In this article, we will look at some of the advanced features of cURL, and how we can use them in our PHP scripts.

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SQL For Beginners Part 2

previewAnother article published on Nettuts

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/sql-for-beginners-part-2/

It is important for every web developer to be familiar with database interactions. In part two of the series, we will continue exploring the SQL language and apply what we’ve learned on a MySQL database. We will learn about Indexes, Data Types and more complex query structures.

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SQL for Beginners

previewAnother article published on Nettuts

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/sql-for-beginners/

Most modern web applications today interact with databases, usually with a language called SQL. Lucky for us, this language is quite easy to learn. In this article, we are going to start with some basic SQL queries and use them to interact with a MySQL database.

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CodeIgniter and Doctrine from scratch.
Day 9 – Templates & Data Hydrators

Codeigniter Doctrine In this article we are going to create Templates (with CodeIgniter) to keep our Views organized, and avoid repeating the same HTML code. Also we are going to learn about Doctrine Data Hydrators to see alternative ways to structure the data returned from the database.

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Top 15+ Best Practices for Writing Super Readable Code

preview My third article for Nettuts was just published:

“Code readability is a universal subject in the world of computer programming. It’s one of the first things we learn as developers. Readable and maintainable code is something to be proud of in a finished product. We can share it with others, contribute to other projects, and reuse code from applications we wrote months or even years ago.

This article will detail the fifteen most important best practices when writing readable code.”

Read More: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/top-15-best-practices-for-writing-super-readable-code/

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CodeIgniter and Doctrine from scratch.
Day 8 – Hooks, Profiling & DQL

Codeigniter Doctrine In this article we are going to look at 3 main subjects: Hooks (with CodeIgniter), Doctrine Profiling and DQL. And we are going to see how we can use these to optimize some of our database interactions.

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HTTP Headers for Dummies

preview_httpMy second article for Nettuts was just published:

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/http-headers-for-dummies/

Whether you’re a programmer or not, you have seen it everywhere on the web. At this moment your browsers address bar shows something that starts with “http://”. Even your first Hello World script sent HTTP headers without you realizing it. In this article we are going to learn about the basics of HTTP headers and how we can use them in our web applications.

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Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices

preview Nettuts+ just published my article!

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/top-20-mysql-best-practices/

Database operations often tend to be the main bottleneck for most web applications today. It’s not only the DBA’s (database administrators) that have to worry about these performance issues. We as programmers need to do our part by structuring tables properly, writing optimized queries and better code. Here are some MySQL optimization techniques for programmers.

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