programming | PracticalWeb Ltd

Optimising PHP

I came across this PDF slideshow from a talk on optimising PHP, it's well balanced and fairly thorough overview.

phpquebec_2009.pdf

Peopleware

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
Tom DeMarco
Timothy Lister

£20.99

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This is an interesting book, with much the same feel as Mythical Man Month, but a focus more on managing the team.

Both books promote the theory that programmers vary vastly in productivity, and that you want to hire the good ones!

This book focusses more on the productivity of teams, suggesting that it isn't so much the individual productivity that matters but that of the group.

Handy one-liners

While creating websites I often find the need to manipulate files in all sorts of ad-hoc ways.

Things that are hard to do by hand, but you don't want to write a whole program for - you'll just use it once and throw it away.

Linux/Unix excels at this sort of task - there is a rich selection of tools and plenty of ready made recipes.

From:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-p101/

I often use

svnversion

I just discovered a nifty little utility

Often working copies are only partially updated, this command gives a very quick command-line summary of the state of the working copy.

It's not as rich an output as kdesvn which will colour code all the updateable files, but its a standard part of svn so should always be available.

Name

svnversion — Summarize the local revision(s) of a working copy.

Software Estimation

Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art: The Black Art Demystified (Best Practices (Microsoft))
Steve McConnell

£22.22

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This is another great book by Steve McConnell.

His empahsis is on large projects with thourough development processes; he gives many examples of rigorous studes that back up his advice.

If you follow all the advice in this book - you'll be able to make very accurate estimates with a clear idea of the risks involved.

Even if you don't need so much detail - the book provides many tips to greatly improve the accuracy of even rough calculations.

Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) First Impressions

Well the new version of Eclipse (3.4 or Ganymede) is out and I've been trying it out. So far I've just installed it, adding in the components I want; and generally trying to see what's new.

Installation

I'm running Linux (Ubuntu 8.04)

Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Robert C Martin)
Michael Feathers

£32.51

buy from amazon

While waiting for a long database import to run I've been browsing my Safari bookshelf and this book looks really good.

I haven't by any means read the whole thing - but it really seems to have answers to questions I have been asking.

The topic of legacy code is one I have worked with a lot - and it's always challenging.

This book deals well with the technical, business, emotional and social impacts of this work.
With chapter titles like

Chapter 6. I Don't Have Much Time and I Have to Change It