The survey showed that as much as 86% of developers listen to music while coding. Of the major music genres, 42% of developers said they prefer coding to music of the rock/pop variety.

The results also included the top artists, some "guilty pleasure" choices and some of the least popular artists. The full results of this survey will be coming out in January 2012, giving a "developer perspective" on the current state of the industry, technology in general and their career.

Fresh from Adam Khoury's massive library of instructional videos comes a four-part, full-fledged tutorial on searching a MySQL database using PHP. The tutorials use the 'worked example' format (like Khan Academy), which makes learning relatively painless for newbies and not completely useless for more experienced developers.

The four videos require you to have at least a decent working knowledge of putting PHP and MySQL together and show you how to:

• create/populate an example table
• build the frontend search form
• use UNION and LIKEs to search the data
• using the FULLTEXT searching in MySQL to find more accurate results

In its current incarnation, this class's functionality is limited, regardless of its decent level of SQL abstraction. Therefore, in this fourth part of the series I'm going to enhance it by making it capable of working with LIKE clauses in a straightforward way.

They look at using LIKE to match values in various columns of the tables and add in a fetchLike method that lets you specify the column to search, the pattern to match on and the table to search in.

In this article, you'll learn how to create a searchable form feature that will query a database table and display current staff member information. During the analysis you'll learn how to do the following: create a database table that will hold current staff listings, create a search form and use PHP, in coordination with Structured Query Language (SQL) to capture information entered by the visitor and append the information to display the results we want to show.

They give you the files for the project and work through each, showing how to make the database, put information in and connect to the database to run the query. He opts for the LIKE functionality in the WHERE clause to find the term as a wildcard in the FirstName field. It's not the most efficient, but it can be useful.

I've been using Zend Studio Neon for the past three weeks and I have to say, for something that is free (beta software) it is quite good. Compared to using VS 2005, Zend Studio Neon has its advantages, since Visual Studio doesn't handle PHP well. Zend Studio Neon also has areas that I didn't like.

His likes included the fact that it's not Eclipse (technically) and that it supports PHPUnit and PHPDocumentor out of the box. Dislikes included the fact that it might not be free in the future and that it lacks FTP support.

I keep trying all the latest and greatest editors out there. I fought with Eclipse and have tried the newer more PHP centric offerings built on Eclipse. I recently tried out Komodo Edit for a week. I had tried the Komodo IDE when it came out for Mac a while back. But, I just keep coming back to jEdit.

He's broken it down into two (well, really three) different sections - the likes and dislikes followed by things that he "doesn't care about but you might" (including Subversion and CVS support).

• 15 Cool Things About PHP That Most People Overlook - a list including the Reflection API, the Standard PHP Library, type hinting and the "magic" functions.
• 12 Things You Should Dislike About PHP - this list includes things like naming conventions, that _tostring doesn't work as (he) expected, magic quotes and register globals and safe mode

Both have their valid points and it's interesting to see how many of the points made in the first article he goes back on and mentions specific instances where it doesn't work as expected. Some of the comparisons seem a bit like he's comparing PHP to his experience in another language and not objectively on PHP's features alone.

The right search engine on your website won't bring you more traffic but it will help your visitors to better locate things so it will keep them on your pages. A good search engine implemented can increase your hits with almost 30% and this is tested. I'm not talking just to have a tutorial.

The different methods the show how to implement include:

• using a straight LIKE on each word entered
• paring down those results using ORs on other columns too
• implementing the Porter Stemmer algorithm
• finding matches that contain the term but not only one part of it
• Full-text searches

It's a good overview of some of the basic steps to getting your own search up and running, but some of them, when applied to sites with larger amounts of data behind them, wouldn't be useful at all (slowness mainly).

His other suggestions include the use of two other tables (terms in one, references back to content in another) or an external search option, such as the Zend Framework's implementation of the lucene functionality - Zend_Search.

Some of the reasons they give include:

• Many PHP-modules are not thread safe
• Non-standard date format characters
• No Unicode