Saturday, July 10, 2004

Tuesdays with Morrie

Supposedly this is a great book. I bought a copy of it a little over a year ago, my wife immediately took it away from me and told me I could read it when she finished. Well here I sit still wondering whether I will ever get to read it. Now you ask - why is he going on about this book - well someone made a movie about it - didn't realize this...

So I was flipping through the channels- okay my mother in law was watching Oxygen and the movie happened to be coming on. So here I sit watching it, trying to gleam the few bits of wisdom the producers might have allowed to be included in a movie as they slaughtered the original manuscript.

I should go fishing - I think better when I am standing in the middle of a cool stream watching the water dapple as a trout noses up to the top to see what some crazy fool is throwing across the water.

Thursday, July 08, 2004

PHP, MySQL...Oh my

So I have been working on this provisioning tool I posted about. Things have changed since I last posted on it. I have changed from building it entirely inside of a TCL wrapper and instead designed this wonderful little web tool. It's quick, smooth, and has the ability to easily grow as new requirements become pressing needs. Those designers in the crowd understand how scope creep allows one gadget, button, request to suddenly take precedent over another one.

In the process of building this tool I have come to love three books: (has to be love when I regulary haul them back and forth from office to house.)

PHP and MySQL Web Development

The purple book - This book has a great layout,you start building an order system for Bob's Auto Parts and work through adding to the scripts. I keep thinking it's an O'Reilly book, and looking for it on my Safari account when I can't remember something. It is what I consider one of the best references going for building good web sites.

PHP MySQL Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution

This book has given me some processes for building a website from the ground up. I have just spun my own sites out without really thinking about it, looking at the flows, or even deciding how the file structure should be constructed before I actually began programming. I took those classes back in my college programming days and forgot them soon after I became a Network Engineer.

and finally because everyone should have a book about web site design from one of the best

Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

I have owned this book for several years, quoted from it (CTO Breakfast) and generally have used this book as reference for everything web related I have ever touched. Philip is always writing something interesting, he had an amazing company (I dreamed of working for his company. You can do a little research on the web and find out how about the demise of ArsDigita.)