This Week’s Link List (December 17, 2010)

I thought December was supposed to be a quiet month. Judging by all the excellent content I’m finding, I guess I was wrong…

• Announcing the 2011 Dutch PHP Conference (call for papers open until Jan 13th): http://techportal.ibuildings.com/2010/12/08/announcing-the-dutch-php-conference-2011/

• If you didn't know about PHPADD (like me), this short post will show you how it can be used to analyze code for compatibility between docblocks and function declarations: http://blog.webmatters.it/2010/12/phpadd-abandoned-docblocks-detector/

• Lorna Mitchell gives her perspective preparing for (and value of) the Zend Certified Engineer exam for PHP 5.3: http://www.lornajane.net/posts/2010/ZCE-5.3-Worth-Doing

• A very interesting interview with Maarten Balliauw about his take on building applications (both ASP.NET and PHP apps) on the Windows Azure platform: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2010/12/14/thought-leaders-in-the-cloud-talking-with-maarten-balliauw-technical-consultant-at-realdomen-and-windows-azure-expert.aspx

• Random Hacks of Kindness…1000 devs, 2 days, lots of caffeine: http://www.npr.org/2010/12/06/131853415/hackathon-2-days-1-000-developers-lots-of-caffeine

• Leidago Noabeb provides some useful PHP scripts for interacting with networks: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/php-networking/Leidago_Noabeb12142010.php3

• An excellent tutorial by Maarten Balliauw about using the Windows Azure SDK for PHP: http://php.dzone.com/articles/windows-azure-sdk-php

• Nate Abele writes about the power and importance of Xdebug: http://phpadvent.org/2010/debugging-by-nate-abele

• Dig a little into the link above and you will find several wonderful holiday gifts here: http://phpadvent.org/2010

• An excellent list of resources for writing Javascript: http://blog.reybango.com/2010/12/15/what-to-read-to-get-up-to-speed-in-javascript/

• Announcing the Make Web Not War 2011 conference: http://www.webnotwar.ca/

• Handy scripts for getting Flickr images using SimpleXML: http://www.ifadey.com/2010/04/get-flickr-images-using-simplexml/

• SQL or NoSQL in the cloud...which should you use? http://www.reliablesoftware.com/DasBlog/PermaLink,guid,064cde07-c5fd-402a-ac86-adb338f50e81.aspx

• A comprehensive look at sharding with SQL Azure: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/sharding-with-sql-azure.aspx

• Robert Raszcynski shows how to use Less CSS to simplify http://techportal.ibuildings.com/2010/12/17/lessphp-php-implementation-of-less-css/

• Bradley Holt and Matthew Weir O'Phinney recently delivered a presentation called Intermediate PHP. Here's the deck: http://bradley-holt.com/2010/12/intermediate-php/

Have a great weekend.

-Brian