The SitePoint Web blog has a recent post from Matthew Setter offering some helpful hints on working with other people's code. In it he shares suggestions ranging from the technical out to a bit more "learning oriented" to get up to speed on concepts and techniques.

Dealing with code created by other people is a fundamental skill for a developer. Give it a year and other people’s code could even be your own. Today I’m going to look at some of the best approaches for how to deal with other people’s code, read legacy code, effectively. It’s not an easy topic to cover.

He's broken it down into a list of several different topics, each with their own descriptions and links to tools or reading resources for more information:

• Interact
• Observe
• Run Tests
• Fix Bugs designed for Newcomers
• Find Available Resources
• Use a Good IDE
• Read Books & Blogs
• Contribute to Documentation
• Be Considerate

He puts some good emphasis on that final point, reminding the reader that it's not just years of experience that make for a better developer, it's more about skill.

On PHPMaster.com there's a new tutorial about array operators in PHP, more so how the usual operators interact with arrays.

Operators in PHP can be organized into seven different categories: arithmetic, assignment, bitwise, comparison, error control, execution, incrementing/decrementing, logical, string, array, and type operators. This article details working with array operators, but also covers how some of the other operators work when used with arrays.

They talk about the operators for:

• array union (plus)
• equality (double equals)
• identity (triple equals)

They also talk briefly about some of the other PHP operators with arrays (like subtraction, multiplication and division) and some of the conversions that PHP does when they're used.

In this new post to his blog Rob Allen shows you how to access the view variables from another ViewModel.

Unlike Zend Framework 1, the view layer in Zend Framework 2 separates the variables assigned to each view model. This means that when you are in the layout view script, you don't automatically have access to variables that were assigned the the action's view model and vice versa.

He includes snippets of code with an example controller and a sample view that fetches a value from a child ViewModel instance. He also shows how to access layout and configuration values in the view.

Robert Basic has put together an ever growing list of tutorials and other resources related to the Zend Framework (including several Twitter users to follow).

Besides the official documentation and the Quickstart, there are many useful resources for Zend Framework, like blogs and Twitter. I did my best to collect them. If you know something that’s not listed here, but should be, please leave a comment and I’ll update the post.

He has three categories right now - blogs of well-known developers of the framework and outspoken proponents of it, Twitter users you can follow that talk about/might help with issues that could come up and some of the books that have been published on the topic. There's also an "Other" category with mentions of IRC channels, the ZF wiki and the ZF forum.

The International PHP Magazine has conducted a poll on its website over the past week, this time asking "You Did Not Know That...", asking developers which of the true statements about PHP they didn't know about.

The options this time were:

• The trailing '?>' in PHP is Optional
• You can embed other programming languages in PHP
• Objects can be made to look like arrays by using Standard PHP Library
• require is faster than require_once
• Anything Less than 5.1.0 is Silly
• All

There wasn't a whole lot of difference in the results of this poll, but the most all-inclusive of the list was the one selected the most - "All". Following that, was that the trailing closing PHP tag is optional, then a tie for third between the "embed other languages" and "Less than PHP 5.1.0" options.

Be sure to cast your vote in their latest poll that asks readers that they're really looking for in their frameworks.

The International PHP Magazine has conducted a poll on its website over the past week, this time asking "You Did Not Know That...", asking developers which of the true statements about PHP they didn't know about.

The options this time were:

• The trailing '?>' in PHP is Optional
• You can embed other programming languages in PHP
• Objects can be made to look like arrays by using Standard PHP Library
• require is faster than require_once
• Anything Less than 5.1.0 is Silly
• All

There wasn't a whole lot of difference in the results of this poll, but the most all-inclusive of the list was the one selected the most - "All". Following that, was that the trailing closing PHP tag is optional, then a tie for third between the "embed other languages" and "Less than PHP 5.1.0" options.

Be sure to cast your vote in their latest poll that asks readers that they're really looking for in their frameworks.

WeberDev.com has posted part three of their "User Authentication With patUser" series today, detailing some of the aditional functionality the patUser package has to offer.

While the API for user and group management does form the core of the patUser library, it's not all there is on display. patUser also includes a number of utility functions that can come in handy for certain specialized tasks.

These functions include identifying users and groups by different criteria (such as name or email address); keeping track of the URLs visited by the user so as to generate a user trail; maintaining user account statistics for auditing purposes; and providing exception-handling routines for more graceful error handling.

They give the details on how to:

• make exceptions,
• track the user's history through the site,
• perform a natural selection search on user data,
• how to identify users,
• record stats about the user's activities

With this tutorial they finish off the series, providing a good solid overview of the patUser package. If you're just now reading the series, be sure to check out part one and part two.

WeberDev.com has posted part three of their "User Authentication With patUser" series today, detailing some of the aditional functionality the patUser package has to offer.

While the API for user and group management does form the core of the patUser library, it's not all there is on display. patUser also includes a number of utility functions that can come in handy for certain specialized tasks.

These functions include identifying users and groups by different criteria (such as name or email address); keeping track of the URLs visited by the user so as to generate a user trail; maintaining user account statistics for auditing purposes; and providing exception-handling routines for more graceful error handling.

They give the details on how to:

• make exceptions,
• track the user's history through the site,
• perform a natural selection search on user data,
• how to identify users,
• record stats about the user's activities

With this tutorial they finish off the series, providing a good solid overview of the patUser package. If you're just now reading the series, be sure to check out part one and part two.

On WebProNews.com a PHP roadmap has been posted - a comprehensive look at what PHP is and how it's evolved.

We expect our readers to have a more than firm handle on what PHP is, but for completeness-sake: PHP (a recursive acronym of PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor) is an open source, server-side web-scripting language for creating dynamic pages.

They look first at what PHP has to offer, then how it's evolved, and finally a comparison of PHP to several other langauges, including Perl, Java, and Cold Fusion.

On WebProNews.com a PHP roadmap has been posted - a comprehensive look at what PHP is and how it's evolved.

We expect our readers to have a more than firm handle on what PHP is, but for completeness-sake: PHP (a recursive acronym of PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor) is an open source, server-side web-scripting language for creating dynamic pages.

They look first at what PHP has to offer, then how it's evolved, and finally a comparison of PHP to several other langauges, including Perl, Java, and Cold Fusion.