Anna Filina has a new post to her site today suggesting that developers are like athletes, they need to practice before they can be good at what they do.

Think of a developer as an athlete. He or she is aiming for a medal in a competition. A figure skater can't just perform a triple axel in the Olympics after seeing it done on television. This requires a lot of practice, so that when the time comes, the performance is flawless. Of course, programming doesn't have to be flawless. One must remain pragmatic, yet it still requires practice before a concept can be safely implemented without breaking the project or missing deadlines. Who will pay for that practice?

She relates the development manager to the coach of a sports team, being the one that guides the developers into being all they can be and trying out new ideas in the process. She also recommends making use of idle time between projects to prototype, do R&D and learn in general.

Developers need a sandbox. If you don't give it to them, you can end up with one of the following issues. Your entire project could become a sandbox, making it unstable. [...] If you want your developers to get better, allow time for practice, not just learning. It's necessary, easy to do when planned and provides countless benefits to your company. Let me know how that advice worked out for you.

Chris Hartjes (aka "The Grumpy Programmer") has made a name for himself in the PHP community as a big proponent of testing of all sorts in web applications. He's taking things to the next level with his own "Grumpy Learning" grouping.

As I also create more products I need a place for them all to live. I have books, and now a course I can teach and I am planning on producing screencasts for sale as well. With that in mind, I am happy to announce I have created Grumpy Learning, an umbrella site for all my training and teaching efforts to hang from.

His first book covered writing testable application, his second book looks more specifically at using PHPUnit. His latest offering is a PHP Testing Bootcamp - a three-session guided look at some of the concepts he shares not only in his books but also from his own experience (January 3rd, 10th & 17th).

In a previous post Ian Barber started looking at code you could use to determine linear regression in PHP. In part two he restructures the code into a more manageable class rather than the mostly procedural process it was before.

In the last post we had a simple stepping algorithm, and a gradient descent implementation, for fitting a line to a set of points with one variable and one 'outcome'. As I mentioned though, it's fairly straightforward to extend that to multiple variables, and even to curves, rather than just straight lines. For this example I've reorganised the code slightly into a class to make life a little easier, but the main changes are just the hypothesis and learn functions.

He restructures the learning method to make it easier to reuse and includes a "scale data" method to compensate for irregularities in the data and compute the variance.

Ken Guest has posted a book review today of an offering from Packt Publishing, Learning Facebook Application Development (by Hasin Hayder and Dr Mark Alexander Bain).

The book was published prior to Facebook's facelift but this doesn't really impact on the usefulness of the book. An overview of FBML, FQL, FBJS (a restricted subset of JavaScript and enforced for security reasons) are given along with information on how to use the test consoles, publish to news feeds, some multimedia aspects of what can be done in Facebook applications and more.

He notes that the book focuses on a PHP5-only world for developing the apps and opts for MySQL as the database of choice. Overall, he found it useful - more so than the online documentation, especially for beginners.

Kae Verens has posted a review of another of Packt Publishing's PHP-related offerings, "Learning PHP Data Objects" by Dennis Popel (published in Aug 2007).

Learning PHP Data Objects, by Dennis Popel, is an introduction to PDO, which walks through the building of a believable test example - a library manager for your home library. [...] I really couldn't find very much about this book that I didn't like. Ignoring the appendices, the book is 154 pages purely devoted to teaching PDO through examples, including error handling, working with BLOBs, even the creation of the M in MVC (Models).

The review mentions Models, Active Record and how the book creates a Library manager application that includes the use of prepared statements and transactions.

Rob Allen has posted a review of the Packt Publishing book "Learning PHP Data Objects" over on his blog today:

Packt Publishing recently sent me a couple of books to review. This post is about the second one I received, Learning PHP Data Objects by Dennis Popel. I was excited to receive this book as PDO underlies a lot of the Zend_Db_Adapter objects that I use in my day to day programming. It seemed like a good idea that I should know more about it.

He provides some good detail of what the book covers (chapter by chapter) as well as a summary including his recommendation for who should use the book and how they can best enjoy its contents.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a review of Packt Publishing's "Learning PHP Data Objects" book writen up by Akash Mehta.

In Learning PHP Data Objects, the author Dennis Popel examines this new [database access] system and explains how to begin using PDO in development as a replacement for typical database drivers. The book is an excellent introduction to the data abstraction layer and also provides essential insight into the inner workings of database interaction with PHP.

Akash talks briefly about the history of PDO and what it can be used for first, then gets into the contents of the book (things like the intro chapters and the quality of the writing). The thing he thinks makes the bok stand out, though, is the examples and sample code that reflect both simple methods and more complex issues PDO developers might run into.

David Sklar has a quick mention of him recieving a Polish tranlation of his book, "Learning PHP5".

I just received a copy of PHP5. Wprowadzenie, the Polish translation of Learning PHP 5.

He also jokes about one of the code listings in the book, trying to figure out what "Kurczak generała O'Tso" might be.

If you would like to order this translation of the book, you can pick it up at helion.pl.

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans has posted his own review of the O'Reilly book "Learning PHP & MySQL" (by Michele E. Davis and Jon A. Phillips).

Learning PHP & MySQL by Michele E. Davis and Jon A. Phillips is targeting graphic designers, Flash developers and others who build web sites but want to know more about the programming side of things. It assumes a basic knowledge of HTML and the web in general. There's really nothing in this book that anyone with an interest in programming and access to a computer couldn't use to expand their skills a bit.

He goes on to talk about what the book contains (and what it doesn't) and some of his inital impressions about the level of content ("There's really no need to show us a graphic of the Apache EULA screen. Just tell us to 'Install Apache by following the on-screen instructions.'").

He reiterates how basic the level of the book is by mentioning the introductory chapters on PHP, MySQL, and using them together. Of course, from there, the topics do get a bit harder - security, PEAR, regular expressions, etc. The book rounds itself out with a sample app - a blog.

Obviously, this is just a basic summary of what Cal has said, so be sure to check out the rest of the review.

David Sklar has two quick new posts today about two new PHP books that he's recieved - a copy of the French version of the O'Reilly "Learning PHP 5" book, and the "PHP Cookbook" in Russian.

The Russian translation of PHP Cookbook, arrived in the mail yesterday. My rudimentary sound-out-Cyrillic-letters skills that remain from a trip to the Soviet Union in 1989 have been helpful as I stumble my way through.

The delivery man also brought PHP 5 - Elementi di programmazione, the Italian translation of Learning PHP 5. It looks great, although I have to admit I'm a tiny bit disappointed that they didn't take the French approach and transpose all the Chinese food references into local delicacies.

If you're interested in either of these translations, be sure to check them out. They're O'Reilly, so you know the quality's good - even better that you can read it in your native language!