Every year dice.com puts together a salary survey for those of us working in tech. It's a chance to look at what other developers say they are making and either snicker or sigh wishfully. This week they released "2010-11 Tech Salary Survey Results". [...] To me, page 5 was the most interesting. Page 5 is a table of salaries by metro area.

He's created a table to lay out the data in a bit more readable (and normalized) format with Charlotte, North Carolina being the baseline and other cities diverging up and down (in salary range) from there. It helps you compare both the salary range and the normalized version of it that includes some of the cost of living that comes along with the location.

A Range object is defined by just two values (three in my variation), so it might seem like too much to have an object just to keep these values, but as you can see from the example, a Range class can have behaviors to change and compare ranges.

He gives two code snippets - the first defines most of the methods of the class in the constructor (using the lambda functions) and the second uses a __call to catch the calls to the same methods but defined normally as private (making them inaccessible to the outside world).

Unfortunately although people usually understand that an IP address is simply an unsigned 32 bit integer, and is easily determined, usually with $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], where the real challenge is - is in specifying the range within which they wish to check that IP address. IP ranges are usually specified in three common ways (in increasing complexity): wildcard, start-end range, classless inter-domain routing.

He looks at each method and includes descriptions and code examples as well as a link to the source code and a live demo of it in action.

Well, at this stage I'm assuming that creating visitor objects with PHP isn't a strange concept to you any longer, therefore I'll continue this journey by developing some additional -yet useful- examples on how to build up and implement visitors with PHP 5. The main purpose of this is simply reaffirming the concepts deployed in the first tutorial, so you can have a solid background for including your own visitor classes inside your PHP applications.

They start off by creating a new abstract class to use in this part, a User class with plenty of properties and methods. Next up, they make a class extending this base, abstract class to make a SoftwareUser that will accept visitor objects. They then use this interface and create a Visitor class to make the calls, showing a code example of them playing nicely together.

They follow the steps to making a CSS file with PHP - generate the header and output the CSS - as well as examples of its usage. They create a range of colors based around a central one, five levels in either direction. The file they've created to accomplish this is also available for download.

In this second part of a three-part series, we take up the topic of server-side validation. By the time you finish this article, you'll have the general guidelines for how to build a form validating class. You'll use some PHP built-in introspection functions, along with regular expressions, to assist you in building this class.

They create several functions, including validateEmpty, validateInteger, validateNumber, validateRange, and validateEmail. Each one (obviously) serves their own purpose, and some are more complex that others (validating an integer versus a valid email address), but they walk you through each, showing you plenty of code and explainations along the way...]]> Tue, 24 Jan 2006 06:57:09 -0600