Slashdot Mirror

Since a long time, I'm using http://faqts.com/ It's not exactly a reference site, but it answers tons of technical questions in many areas. It started with java and php, but now, the topics are realy wide, ranging from python, php, ... to education, religion, qrt and far more...

Codewright is dead. I'd like to say "bring back the Brief editor" which, as I recall, was owned by Borland. I'd like to, but now I'm using vslick. Your time, Borland, has come and gone. You tubed the products I used, so I had to find others. Now I like the replacements, so why change back? If we're talking TurboPython or TurboRuby, you might get my attention, but it had better be juicy enough to lure me away from the open-source alternatives.

To Clueless Moderators: Parent post is not flamebait.

Brief was possibly the best text editor ever made. It was developed by a software company called "UnderWare".

1983 - BRIEF: The Underware corporation releases the BRIEF
(='B'asic 'R'econfigurable 'I'nteractive 'E'diting 'F'acility) text
editor, written by Dave Nanian and Michael Strickman. BRIEF was bought
by Solution Systems, then bought by Borland.
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid /36113

Enjoy,

Java for Artificial Intelligence is a resource page for university courses in Java coding and artificial intelligence.

Java.Faqts tells you all about Java -- for when you have problems and need to ask questions.

This page actually has alot of links of changes and new features. What's New

You can have polarising glasses which work regardless of their orientation. Most polarisers used are linearly polarising. But you can add a quarter-wave retarder to make them circularly polarising. It can be arranged such that one eye sees clockwise and the other sees counter/anti-clockwise polarisations. Ditto for the projectors. However, this increases the cost and reduces the brightness. For more info, see http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid /11916/fid/801 and http://www.instrumentplastics.co.uk/products_cpf.p hp

it really shouldn't be that hard... modify the script -Here- and put it in a loop. Though, with so many bogus CC numbers tying up this guys records, your site/server might become one of interest to somebody who is pretty shady to begin with.

BIND 9 and the DNS server portion of Microsoft Active Directory(TM) already have this - they're call srv records.

And, of course, djbdns supports srv and other record formats.
Here is a brief outline - srv and rr records
and a tinydns srv record formatting tool

For a list of PHP 5 related tutorials and articles check out this faqt or simply look around the faqts PHP 5 section.

For a list of PHP 5 related tutorials and articles check out this faqt or simply look around the faqts PHP 5 section.

http://faqts.com/ works and has been around at least a few years. (Be patient after hitting "Save" over there, though; that aspect of the site was plenty slow today.)

Build a Knowledge Base - for FREE!

Anyone can build a FAQTs knowledge base. We are always looking for new topic areas and people willing to contribute and edit answers.

You can set up a new knowledge base yourself immediately, just create the new folders. If you don't feel confident, contact us and we'll do it for you.

Hmmm.. I've always preferred javascript faqts, run by Martin Honnen. It is a little difficult to search, a bit unintuitive, but there's stacks of excellent and up-to-date scripting info there.

PHP 5 isn't really documented in the PHP 5 manual yet as there are still a few features on the move, and new features to come, but here's a list of PHP 5 related articles and presentations:

Faq: Where can I get more information about PHP5?

Enjoy!

Dive Into Python, a free online book for advanced programmers

Python FAQT, user-expandable knowledge base with great questions and answers

Python Library Reference, ed. by Guido van Rossum and Fred L. Drake, Jr. [need I say more?]

Python Tutorial, ed. by Guido van Rossum and Fred L. Drake, Jr.

The Whole Python FAQ

Learning Python is not hard (remember how long it took you to learn Perl?) -- you can do it in an evening by reading any one of these free (and Free) online books:

• Dive Into Python - written for the Slashdot crowd, it assumes you know one real language (like Perl, Java, or C++) and takes you from there. Steps through real code to teach you the language basics (and not-so-basics), and makes frequent comparisons to the language(s) you already know.
• How To Think Like A Computer Scientist (Python version) - better for those with less programming experience. Not as detailed, but gentler.
• Learning To Program - for those with no programming experience whatsoever who want to learn Python as their first programming language.

Once you've read any or those, you'll want to dig into some real code, so head over to the Python Knowledge Base for tons of real code examples, and Vaults of Parnassus for tons of free third-party modules and libraries.

-M

"The fact that it must be purchased is not ironic the fact that I could not buy a copy scan it in and post it on the net *is*. "

That's a good summary of what I had in mind.

I don't mean to harshly criticize the author nor the open source (or FSF) group. But I do find it amusing that a book promoting open source is most likely not "open source" itself.

I think the key issue, as someone else pointed out, is that the original author should have the discretion over the circumstances under which his/her work is copied and distributed.

Still, if someone promoted the idea of taking friends out to dinner, but never actually treated his friends to dinner, you'd have to wonder if they they truly believed what they espoused.

If code is language, as some Open Source advocates claim, then the methods by which software is created and distributed ought to be applicable in some cases to the creation of written works. But if a prominent OS "evangelical tract" does not follow the practice it promotes, I think non-Open Source people may well cry "foul"; I think that would be a reasonable assertion too.

Just something to think about. (And sorry about all the butchered metaphors) (And I like free software, and have contributed some minor free for PHP stuff. So I think that a pseudo-OS approach to writing texts is viable in some cases.)
-----
D. Fischer

While the case study chapter may not be interesting to most, the last chapter on extending the Zend engine should be a must read for anyone wanting to add their own functions.
It has the blessing of the Zend team as 'the' resource for extending Zend and that chapter is also published under the Open Content License meaning it can be distributed outside of the book just like any other piece of open source software. Observant readers will note the inclusion of the open source license at the rear of the book.

As for PHP resources, as someone pointed out, the PHP documentation is pretty damn fine and is available via CVS as sometimes the web version lags behind.
PHPBuilder.com, Zend.com, FAQTS and Weberdev amongst others all have plenty of applications, tips and tutorials.

Graeme

About the only thing the manual lacks is an index of functions, but a little bit of experience is generally enough to help you figure out the category under which they've hidden the function you're looking for. I see now that the PDF version of the manual is indexed, so newbies to the manual may want to start there.

OTOH, I'm a long-time C programmer, and when I wondered about syntax, pretending that PHP is C with dollar signs in front of the variable names has worked out more often than not.

Since this page is (presently) screwey and I can't figure out how to reply to an individual posting, in answer to "why PHP instead of Perl?", why not? Oh, all right. Here's a couple of reasons:

• PHP runs in the context of Apache (except the Windows version) which makes it outrageously fast on the UltraSPARC II I'm using most of the time, but then so does perl if you use mod_perl. You'll notice I said nothing about "X is faster than Y". I've found PHP/MySQL to be "very fast" in my applications, and let's leave it at that.
• PHP has got excellent integration with databases (especially MySQL), but I imagine something similar is available for perl.
• PHP is smaller than perl, which means that a PHP mod Apache won't have anything like the footprint of a mod_perl Apache (good to know when you're paying Sun's memory prices)
• There's nothing remotely similar to CPAN, and the Free PHP apps I've seen out there aren't that useful, which means that if you're writing PHP, you're probably doing it mostly from scratch rather than extending others' apps. I actually find this useful. I figure if you're doing server-side scripting, speed is the number-one virtue, and reuse -- at least the kind of reuse I've done -- usually incurs a speed penalty.

So if I were buying a PHP book, the first thing I'd look for are applications that are like the application I'm building to see if I could steal some ideas and code snippets. And I'd look for stuff about the big picture that the originators sometimes forget to put into their documents. But I'm not in the market for a PHP book because the manual is so good and because years in the salt mines of C have pretty well taught me how to code a solution to a problem.

Let me hit on one more thing if I may. When you read the source code, you're reading the truth. When you the canonical documents (the language spec or the documentation supplied with the language) you're one step away from the truth. When you read a textbook, you're two steps away from the truth.

I'm generally too lazy to read the source code (not always -- that's how I learned Unix networking, but there were some special circumstances there or I'd just have read a book like a sensible person), but I've been bushwhacked by enough documentation bugs to do as much learning as I can from the canonical documents.

YMMV, of course.