[compsoc-announce] Week 6: PHP best practices

[Will Thompson]

i'm in ur inboxes, announcin ur events!

Calling all web developers:

Applying Good Practice to a Misused Language
============================================

Date: Wednesday 15th November
Time: 20.00
Place: Comlab, room 051

    Over the past few years, PHP has become the tool of choice for
    aspiring web developers everywhere — picked up and misused by
    millions. As a language that is easy to get started with, through
    examples and code snippets across the web, it is cut and pasted to
    death, leaving a legacy of unreadability and insecurity and a
    reputation as a 'bad' language.

    David and Katherine Goodwin of Pale Purple[0] will discuss some of
    the pitfalls of PHP development and introduce a range of tools and
    techniques that can be used to transform a lacklustre PHP amateur
    into a polished professional. It will focus mainly on applying good
    design and testing to projects, and introduce some of the popular
    tools that will help developers to achieve clean, secure,
    maintainable code. 

[0] http://www.palepurple.co.uk/

http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Computing_Laboratory has some
information about Comlab (in case you're not familiar with it).  There
is a door into the basement to the left of the door into the main
reception, which we will be using.

This talk is fresh from LinuxWorld Expo a few weeks ago (where Katherine
was also a judge at the 2006 Linux Awards[1]).  Should be enlightening!

[1] http://www.linuxawards.co.uk/

The true date of Murray Stokely
===============================

Last time I mailed you all I said:

> Also, while I'm here, Murray Stokely (of Google)'s talk in 7th week has
> been moved from Friday 24th to Wednesday 22nd.

This is, in fact, a lie.  It was originally on Wednesday 22nd, and is
now on Friday 24th.  That'll teach me to write emails in a hurry in a
coffee shop without actually reading what I've been told.

Pizza for breakfast
===================

Before, during and after Andy Stanford-Clark's talk, people were
performing calculations on pizza.  Suppose you have a θ-degree sector of
pizza (which I believe is colloquially known as a "slice") and wish to
share it evenly between two people.  The sensible thing to do is of
course to bisect the angle, but we don't care.  Where should you slice
the pizza horizontally to create two pieces of equal area?

Correct answers from people who weren't at the talk get a copy of Linux
Magazine pidged to them!  I hope you don't get stuck at calculating the
area of a triangle like I did...

Enough.  Oh, and if you didn't understand my greeting, you could read
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/11/i_am_in_thy_library_.html and be
enlightened.  I never get bored of photos of cats.

wjt
--
Will Thompson, Oxford University Computer Society President
<http://www.ox.compsoc.net/>