Michael Nolan

My copy of the Definitive Guide to Symfony arrived through the post on Friday. It’s published under the GNU Free Documentation Licence and went online last week so I’d already scanned through the content but I got a chance to have a proper read through over the weekend.

There’s usually something slightly disappointing about PHP manuals - I find they either go into too much or not enough detail, or do things differently to how I would but I’ve not found that to be the case with symfony. The book is well structured with chapters covering everything from installation to extending the core classes and optimisation. I was very impressed with the sample chapter they released as a PDF and the rest is of a similar high standard.

There’s not much point in me going through everything that’s in the book - it’s free online for everyone to read - but I would recommend getting a paper copy anyway as it’s very well put together. Buy online from Amazon.com and support the symfony project or buy from Amazon.co.uk and the commission cheque will go to Ormskirk Scouts

So next weekend is Moonlight. The finish was announced yesterday as Halsall School, a place I should know fairly well having done Explorers there for the last few months! Still a team member short but hopefully we’ll be able to sort that out before next Saturday.

Also next Saturday is the PHP Throwdown competition. Take a look at the website if you’re interested in all the details but it’s basically a race over 24 hours to make the best website application you can in PHP.  I’d really like to take part but I’m going to struggle a little I think - I’ll be up at 8am on Saturday but won’t be able to start programming until after 10pm and the last slot starts at 6pm so I’ll be 4 hours behind without writing even a line of code.

I’ve got an idea for a website so I’m going to try to work it out on paper this week to give me a chance of being able to complete it but it’ll take a lot of work and I’m going to be knackered by 6pm Sunday!