Page 2 - PHP training

Doug have you tried using the .chm on windows ? its got a nice search feature that helps you find whatever you need offline.. well at least served my purposes for most cases.

Only had one issue with using pear classes..had to use a different manual, and it was tough finding what i needed in the pear package.. but thats not directly a PHP issue i guess.

On a related issue... do anyone feel languages maintained by a singular organisation have better documentation than languages maintained by standards organisations ? for example Java/python/.NET is so much better documented than say JavaScript or Perl ?

I dont know if I'm getting my point across... i know the various reasons for it of course.. but just wondering if Standards organisations actually affect the quality of documentation for an language.

That's the same book I started with...I found it very helpful.

Yeh i like books not to keen on online documetation, i like my post-it notes to much and NO before someone says print them out they just don't feel like books to me =D

Books Rock online documentation Ewwwww lol

Yes, I prefer chm help whenever possible. My "complaint" is the layout of the manual, not what's in it. I find it difficult to determine a necessary function to use and it's not easy to browse functions. For one thing, a simple alphabetic click list on the function index would make life easier, and the function index could be in the functions chapter instead of the appendix. Maybe I've just been spoiled over the years working with high-quality commercial documentation from companies like IBM, MS, DEC (in the past anyway) and others.

Don't get me wrong, the PHP documentation is great compared to most other open source documentation I've seen

Sorry i had a look on php.net and could not find the CHM/Tarball are they a downloadable document or a online source? or neither?

what ?? tried this --> http://www.php.net/download-docs.php

Dohh saw that did not think that was what u guys where on about, ignore me its been a long week and its only teusday =(

Since we're talking about php docs, does anyone know any link to any documentation on the new php-win.exe program provided with php 5+? I looked for quite a while and I haven't found anything but a casual mention about it in the cli page in the documentation. Perhaps there is nothing to know, but I'm curious if there are any switches or arguments that might not get passed on to php.exe.

As far as i know php-win.exe is equal to the CLI version (php.exe), except that php-win doesn't output anything and thus provides no console. Everything else is identical.. well at least as far as i can see, so theorectically it should accept any switch that php.exe would have to accepted. In fact the winbinder project i used once for a project (for rapid prototyping) relies almost entirely on the php-win executable .

Thanks, that's what I figured. I've been playing around with php-gtk2 and Gnope on a computer with an existing php, and had to pass an argument to php-win.exe identifying the php.ini to use. I just tacked it onto php-win in a shortcut, everything worked, but I can't find any other information on php-win anywhere

hmm.. you know.. I never really bothered to look... but I did after seeing your question. Strange isnt it. Maybe you could contact some of the developers behind some of the PECl's that use php-win.exe ... winbinder for example.

Oh <sheepishly> .. yeah i just dragged my apps written using the winbinder wraps onto the php-win.exe icon to run it. Cant help it.. I'm still a sucker for quick ol drag and drop.

on a slightly related note.. i was looking at ways to compile my client php scripts (used for prototyping) .. was thinking I could include the php file as a resouce in a windows executable. think this is a feasibly line of research ? already found a couple of handy tools to get me going along on this. I'm using winbinder and phph 5 on windows.

I don't know about putting the php code in a res file, but since you can put strings in res files I don't know why not, unless there is some length limitation. I do a lot of VB6 coding but seldom use res files. Were you looking at this method as a way to hide the php code?

well... not exactly hide php code , as in to prevent people from stealing the cde or anything. They can have the code ...dont care about it ..

I usually use php like this for building quick and dirty prototypes (i eventually code up in VB/VC or lately .net)..so it makes things so much easier if i can find a way of creating an executable which I can then run with ease on any client machine, without the need of installation..i could mail them prototypes, or have them download i, and then click the exe.

The res file was only an option... I found another method using a 3rd party tool. I think that tool uses the res file though from what i could see. Will post if succeed if anyones interested.. or I'll blog it and post the link.