Here are some extra dates for your diary ...
21st March - Object Oriented PHP (1 day) [link]
22nd and 23rd March - PHP Techniques Workshop (2 days) [link]
27th and 28th April - MySQL [link]
Starting 31st May - Learning to program in Lua (4 days) [link]
Starting 1st June - Lua Programming (5 days) ....
I've always thought it a bit odd that you call a function with any number of parameters, and yet it returns a single value; in Java, C or C++ you declare a return type (void if there is not to be anything returned) and you are then constrained by that specification. There are, of course, other ways ....
Ruby's a great language. No - let me rephrase that "Ruby's a fantastic language" ... for many tasks such as "data munging" - handling / manipulating large flows of data, in all sorts of ways. But in my training role, I come across far more people using Ruby on Rails, Selenium and Watir than Ruby fo ....
On 31st January, I traveled by overnight ferry from Birkenhead to Belfast - fare, 40 pounds, to include a dinner in the evening and breakfast the next morning. On February 3rd, I returned - fare 40 pounds, but "as from 1st February we no longer include dinner and breakfast in this fare" - and dinne ....
An iterator (a.k.a. generator in Python) is a function which returns its results as it calculates them, rather than building them up into a larger structure to return all at once when the function is completed. So where you have a big flow of incoming data, you can handle it as it arrives rather th ....
If you're programming in C, C++ or Java, you'll be managing a large number of source files, and using a whole series of commands to build these forward into .o (object) or .class (java class) files, then - in the cases of C and C++ - into executable files.
The make system has been around for as lon ....
In Ruby, you can define a class ... and then come back and add methods to it. But why would you want to?
Let's suppose that you've got a base class - I'll use "Rectangle" as my example, and you've already subclassed it to "Square" and perhaps a few other things, via a required file that you share ....
It's been a very busy couple of days ... I had planned to pack yesterday morning and travel up by train, through the afternoon and early evening to take the overnight ferry from Birkenhead to Liverpool Belfast.
Then the BBC called ... and I found myself being interviewed for a story on Points West ....
I've been reading a report on a minor railway accident which could have been much more serious - a crane driver swung a piece of rail he was replacing on one track in front of a train that was approaching on another line - [report here], and it struck me as I read just how many abbreviations / acron ....
Most modern languages translate the source code you give into an intermediate byte code prior to it being run, and in can sometimes be useful and instructive to reverse engineer the code to help to understand what's going on within the more arcane elements of the language. Some languages actually ....