Leonid Mamchenkov has linked over to a great thread over on Quora that asks the question "[What are some things you wish you knew when you started programming?

](https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-things-you-wish-you-knew-when-you-started-programming)?"

The post is originally from Ken Mazaika, CTO, Co-founder & Mentor @ thefirehoseproject.com but it has expanded way beyond his original list of 27 things. There's comments sharing everything from personal experiences out to their own lists of things they wish they knew. Topics mentioned include:

• the "cognitive burden"
• the importance of getting away from the screen sometimes
• the value in listening, not just hearing, your colleagues
• thinking about security at all times
• learning the "why" of coding, not just the "how"

There's a lot more in this post so get over and start reading. There tips in here for everyone, both those new to programming and those that have been doing it for years.

On the SEO Expert Blog today, there's a new tutorial showing hos to consume the XML provided by the Amazon wish list service with the help of PHP5's SimpleXML functionality.

With PHP5 XML processing finally became easy thanks to the SimpleXML functions, that convert an XML document to an object that can be processed using property selectors and array iterators. A few days ago I integrated my Amazon wish list on this site with very few lines of code as you will see when you read the rest of this brief tutorial.

He walks through the connection both creating the XML request and handling the XML response to output the resulting images (books) linked to their Amazon pages.

On the SEO Expert Blog today, there's a new tutorial showing hos to consume the XML provided by the Amazon wish list service with the help of PHP5's SimpleXML functionality.

With PHP5 XML processing finally became easy thanks to the SimpleXML functions, that convert an XML document to an object that can be processed using property selectors and array iterators. A few days ago I integrated my Amazon wish list on this site with very few lines of code as you will see when you read the rest of this brief tutorial.

He walks through the connection both creating the XML request and handling the XML response to output the resulting images (books) linked to their Amazon pages.