Some of my recent clients, who I had done PHP or Django work for, asked me if I had any Flash (or Flex) development experience and of course my answer was no. Since I’ve been a Server-end programmer, it’s been a challenge as it is, to add to my “skill-belt” things like hard core Javascript (and a lot of that was gaining competency in jQuery), CSS, and HTML

Consequently, though, I’ve still decided to go ahead and add Actionscript (which lets you do Flash or Flex programming) to my stuff-I-know list (in between other work).

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I’m currently reading High Performance MySQL by Schwartz, Zaitsev, Tkachenko, Zawodny, Lentz, Balling

Great, in-depth material on everything related to customizing your MySQL Database configuration, and a plethora of info on all of the many, many ways and tools available, for measuring, profiling, analyzing your database.

If you’re strictly an “end user” type programmer of MySQL (versus being a DBA), and have only ever created the basic tables without attention to specifics, and without knowing what the defaults are, etc..
    I summarized some under-the-hood facts that might help with getting more out of MySQL than you’re used to.

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I recently started using PHP’s built-in syntax checker on a more regular basis - it cuts down that whole eyeball-ing routine where you think you know that there is a missing semi-colon, and you insist on searching for it all over the place, or you’re confident you can find the extra closing parentheiss, and you waste time scanning the page.

I set up two tools (basically launchers) in UltraEdit to launch php -l (small L).

One of them to syntax-check 1.) the Active File, (if you’re not setting this up in UltraEdit, which I assume the majority, just basically just call php -l filename.php)

When using jQuery, it’s almost a given that you are using the
$(document).ready(function() {} )
functionality in order to immediately, upon page load, attach events to controls - things like attaching a check-all-boxes() function to the checkbox input. I thought I had everything organized correctly when I simply had the django blocks {* *}, to only include the associated javascript so that the base.html template file would have it.

base.html
  - items.html (inherits base.html)
  - mealplans.html (inherits base.html)

And then in each of those:
  - items.html

    {% block js_ready %}
              massive amount of javascript,
             (especially since my latest site,
             fridgeclick.com has a lot of ajax)
    {% endblock %}
 - mealplans.html  ( the same here )

However modularized I thought this was, when I did a “view source” in the browser after navigating to either of these pages, there was a big mess, way too much javascript looking back at me.

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