In a recent post to his site Eduards Sizvos shares an opinion that's believed by many in the development world: stop learning frameworks.

We are developers. We need to stay up to date with technology. Every day, we learn programming languages, frameworks, and libraries. The more modern tools we know?—?the better.

Keeping up to date with Angular, React, Vue, Riot, Ember, Knockout is fun.

But we are wasting our time.

He goes on to talk about time, how important it is to spend on the right things and offers a story of his own where learning specific technologies didn't help in the long run. He then shares some resources (books) to help you learn good concepts instead of specific tools.

Remember – frameworks, libraries and tools come and go. Time is precious. Invest your golden time in transferable skills. Skills that will always be relevant.

Leonid Mamchenkov has put together a post for those out there trying to get started with workflows in PHP and offers some tips from his own experience.

For a large project at work, we need to integrate or develop a workflow engine. I worked a little bit with workflow engines in the past, but the subject is way to big and complex for me to claim any expertise in it.

So, I am looking at what’s available these days and what are our options. This post is a collection of initial links and thoughts, and it’s goal is mostly to document my research process and findings, and not to provide any answers or solutions yet.

He starts off by defining the requirements of the system he's looking for, both on the technology side and the functional side. He outlines his expected flow and then links to some other resources he found to help define common terminology and some of the standards he found. He found the BPMN v2.0 and tracked down several PHP packages that implement that workflow structure (all linked as well).

You may have been using relational databases in your PHP applications for a long time (PHP loves MySQL after all) but you might not have ever dug deep enough to understand how those databases work internally. In this detailed tutorial from Coding Geek they dive way in and cover everything from the basics out to complex sorting, management components and query handling.

When it comes to relational databases, I can’t help thinking that something is missing. They’re used everywhere. [...] you can google by yourself “how does a relational database work” to see how few results there are. [...] Are relational databases too old and too boring to be explained outside of university courses, research papers and books?

As a developer, I HATE using something I don’t understand. And, if databases have been used for 40 years, there must be a reason. [...] Over the years, I’ve spent hundreds of hours to really understand these weird black boxes I use every day. Relational Databases are very interesting because they’re based on useful and reusable concepts. If understanding a database interests you but you’ve never had the time or the will to dig into this wide subject, you should like this article.

He covers a wide range of topics during the post:

• O(1)) vs O(n2) (or how data sets are handled based on size)
• Array, Tree and Hash table
• Global overview (structure of the database system and its pieces)
• Query manager
• Statistics (and optimizing storage of the data)
• Data manager
• Deadlock
• Logging

Each of these topics comes with a lot of explanation, examples of how the internals are functioning as well as diagrams to help make a bit more sense. If you've ever really wanted to know how that database you use functions, this is definitely the article to check out.

For those working to move from procedural PHP into a more object-oriented world but may be having some trouble with the transition, the Star Tutorial site has a great beginner OOP in PHP guide you should check out.

They cover all of the basics you'll need to get started with objects in PHP including:

• classes versus objects
• visibility
• inheritance
• polymorphism
• interfaces versus abstract classes

Each section is a quick definition and a bit of code to help illustrate the point. This isn't going to be a hand-holding kind of tutorial showing you each step to making an OOP application. Instead, it provides quick, high level summaries of the main OOP concepts to get you on the right road.

For those working to move from procedural PHP into a more object-oriented world but may be having some trouble with the transition, the Star Tutorial site has a great beginner OOP in PHP guide you should check out.

They cover all of the basics you'll need to get started with objects in PHP including:

• classes versus objects
• visibility
• inheritance
• polymorphism
• interfaces versus abstract classes

Each section is a quick definition and a bit of code to help illustrate the point. This isn't going to be a hand-holding kind of tutorial showing you each step to making an OOP application. Instead, it provides quick, high level summaries of the main OOP concepts to get you on the right road.

William Durand has a new post to his site sharing not only the slides from his recent presentation on SOLID vs STUPID code but the same content written out. It provides a great overview of the two concepts and some examples of what to avoid. There's also a recording of the session you can listen to via the in-page player.

Last week I gave a talk about Object-Oriented Programming at Michelin, the company I am working for. I talked about writing better code, from STUPID to SOLID code! STUPID as well as SOLID are two acronyms, and have been covered quite a lot for a long time. However, these mnemonics are not always well-known, so it is worth spreading the word.

In the following, I will introduce both STUPID and SOLID principles. Keep in mind that these are principles, not laws. However, considering them as laws would be good for those who want to improve themselves.

He starts with the STUPID concepts first - Singleton, Tight Coupling, Untestability, Premature Optimization, Indescriptive Naming and Duplication. He goes through each of these and explains why they're bad things to have in your code. He then gets into the SOLID ideals - Single Responsibility Principle, Open/Closed Principle, Liskov Substitution Principle, Interface Segregation Principle and Dependency Inversion Principle. These are a bit more complex to understand but he does a good job (complete with code snippets) of each. The slides for his presentation are also included but they're just a high level look at the same concepts from the article.

On the Script-Tutorial.com site today there's a new post looking at functional programming in PHP - some of the concepts involved and example code showing how to make it work.

Functional programming can be defined in simple terms as a programming paradigm that do not change the state of a program instead it uses pure functions. A pure function is a function that has the ability to accept a value and return another value without changing the input supplied to it. It is characterized by its ability to support functions that are of high order. [...] A programming paradigm that is functional has the following attributes: do not alter the states which make parallelism easier, deals mostly with a function which is the smallest unit hence enhances readability of code, has deterministic functions that enable stability of a program.

He talks some about anonymous/lambda functions (closures) and their role in PHP's implementation of functional programming. He also talks some about partial functions, currying, higher order functions and recursion. He finishes off the article with a look at some of the advantages this method of development can bring as well as some of the disadvantages that come with things like recursion and the learning curve of the method.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial written up by Shameer C looking at functional programming with PHP - some of the basic concepts of it and how much is possible in the language.

Many programmer like to talk about functional programming, but if you ask them if they’ve ever done it, most of their replies will be “No”. The reason is quite simple: we are taught to think in an imperative manner when we first start learning to program, in terms of flow charts and steps to be followed in the program. So in this article I’ll explain some important concepts to functional programming and how to write functional code in PHP.

He starts by defining some of the basic fundamental concepts of functional programming including recursion, referential transparency, higher order functions and lambda functions. He includes a bit of code along the way, showing things a bit more practically.

As mentioned in this new post to his blog Jeremy Brown has put together a presentation he calls "A Conversation about REST", a discussion that centers less around the implementation of REST and more about the concepts needed to fully understand it.

REST is a set of principles and not a specification, so as such you have freedom in how to develop your API. This freedom can lead to confusion though, as it’s hard to find concrete examples of its implementation. This presentation explained what REST is and also presented a variety of topics and questions you will certainly come across while implementing your API.

You can watch a video of this great presentation (as taken at a Club Ajax meeting in Dallas) here and can follow along with his slides off of SlideShare. He also links to a great image that gives a flow overview of the possible paths a REST request could take.

Paul Reinheimer has written up a review of one of the latest offerings from No Starch Press - "Object-Oriented PHP, Concepts, Techniques, and Code".

I'll get this out of the way up front; I approached this book with a completely inaccurate perception of what it was going to give me. I would consider myself an intermediate to advanced php developer, and I was hoping this book would teach me awesome ways to use PHP5's OOP power to make my applications better, faster, and more attractive to women.

That wasn't what this book does. This book introduces OOP, explains why it's useful, and goes through to develop several sample applications to demonstrate OOPs power, and more importantly how to use it.

He goes on to talk about the content/size of the book (relatively thin) including what it covers - beginning OOP, OOP in PHP4 and PHP5, a sample application, and a brief look at some of the more advanced features possible.

His overall opinion of the book is good, but there were two complaints that he had, more of a technical nature than just about the content (like the quality checking of the font size in paragraphs, changing in the middle). He'd still recommend it to those looking to get into OOP in PHP, though.