Lars Tesmer is currently in the process of learning Ruby. He' been working through the tutorials and some sample scripts and has come across some pitfalls along the way. In his latest post he shares four of them that've stood out in his development so far.

I’m currently learning Ruby. In this post I'll list some pitfalls for programmers coming from PHP that would probably cause some confusion if you aren't aware of them. This list is by no means complete, while I learn Ruby I'll very probably encounter more gotchas, which I will blog about, too.

For each of his four examples, he gives the code PHP developers are used to seeing and the Ruby code that may or may not do what you'd expect:

• Arrays are continuous
• Zero is not falsy
• The keywords private and protected
• There's no static keyword

On the Mayflower blog there's a new post talking about some of the common pitfalls for PHP developers that are starting their work with the front end Javascript language.

If we take a look at our current job advertisement, these knowledge is still important, but also skills in JavaScript are asked and strongly desired. If you wonder why JavaScript is so popular at these times, my answer is quite simple: The browser is no longer a stupid instrument to view some static websites on the internet- the browser turned into an (Web-) Application Platform that provides more content then plain text.

They start by comparing some of the data types common between the two (with most things on the Javascript side ending up as an object). They also talk about the fact that arrays are not (technically) arrays like PHP developers think of them. They finish it off with two more common problems PHP devs have when making the move - looping through arrays and "the thing with the semicolon".

On The Bakery today there's a new post with a few things to watch out for when you're just getting started with the CakePHP framework.

Starting from scratch in cakephp is not always easy, especially when you are not used to MVC frameworks. I hope this will help other beginners to make their life easier.

Pitfalls listed include:

• Incorrect filenames
• Remember to use "echo" in views
• Unexpected results in ajax calls
• Put the query where it belongs

Check out the rest of the post for more handy tips.

Leonid Mamchenkov points out an article that lists some of the common pitfalls developers should consider when it comes to working with Open Source projects.

The blog post talks about roughly the same, but from a different perspective. It's more for those who are starting a new project, rather then joining the existing one. There are plenty of 'myths' that go around about how is it is to do Open Source and how everyone can do it, and that all you need to succeed is to start. That's not so true, of course.

He outlines the article into some of the key points like:

• Your community will help you build HARD DIFFICULT FEATURE X.
• Folks can understand your code.
• Contributors are like coworkers.
• Cross distribution support is easy.
• Users help users and it’s ok to just be a developer.

Check out the full article here: Recognizing and Avoiding Common Open Source Community Pitfalls.