Newbies Paradise

PHP tutorial almost finished!

contact@newbiesparadise.com (ixM) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:50:54 +0100

Hi there!

This is some good news: the PHP tutorial is almost finished. We're still working on the last chapter which should be released very soon!

So, first let's see what the last chapter of part IV is about: "Regular expressions (Part 2/2)".
In the first chapter, you've been taught how to write simple RegEx but now you'll learn how to write more complicated RegEx and how to select and replace patterns using regular expressions.

Then, let's take a look at the appendix.

In the "Writing legible code" chapter, you'll discover how important it is to format your code using indentation and comments. All the little things you will learn in this chapter, will help you and the people who have to read your source code to understand much more easier what you wanted to do!

You've learnt a lot of things but not everything. There are a bunch of functions which you don't know yet and which could be very useful for you. You might be wondering how you could find these functions and how to use them. That's exactly what the "Use the PHP documentation!" chapter is about!

When writing a PHP script, you will have to face the most boring part of coding: debugging. If it has never been the case, you're lucky but thrust me, it will happen. Therefore, we've written a chapter called "Help! My script is crashing!". At the end, errors like "Headers already sent" or "undefined function" will have no secrets for you anymore.

The last chapter released today - "Note for the Regex" - will be useful for you when writing RegEx, it's a simple page which all essential informations about RegEx on it.

So, enjoy!

Look at our pretty website

contact@newbiesparadise.com (speedking) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:16:14 +0100

Hey there!

As you may have noticed, newbies paradise has been through quite of a change today. The entire website's layout and template have been redesigned to give it a more "up-to-date" look and make it more pleasant for you to navigate through.
We have been working on this for months and we are glad to finally be able to release it.
We realise that it might not be perfect or it might not please everyone, so do not hesitate to post any comments on the forums

A special thanks to Cam, who spent days trying to make this layout what it is today.

On a side note, the last part of the PHP tutoral will soon be released, and a brand new C/C++ tutorial will follow after that!

That's all for now, enjoy our new layout

Chapter release : part 4 is online

contact@newbiesparadise.com (ixM) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:37:50 +0100

Hi there,

Were you waiting for new chapters? Of course, I knew you were

So, what does part 4 "Welcome to the next level..." contain?

First of all, you'll find a new chapter concerning arrays. Arrays are really great but it's so annoying to display all the values in order to see what they contain when you want to debug your code. Not anymore, print_r will help you to save your time! You'll also find out how to search for a value in an array and how to store an array in a string (useful if you want to save it in your database for example!).

The second released chapter will teach you how to use the GD library in order to modify or create images with PHP! You will be able to draw text on images in order to display a cool digital clock with changing background depending on the time (black when it's night and blue when the sun is shining )

And in the last one, you will be taught the use of regular expressions which you won't be able to work without anymore. For example, if you have a registration page where users have to enter an email address and you are fed up with these people who make mistakes or just don't want to enter their email and then just type something like "iguessyourwebsitedoesntuseregex" (yeah ok, it is quite unlikely but, who knows?). Now this time is over, regex will allow you to check if the email they've entered has the following form: xxx@xxx.xxx
Great, isn't it?

So, let's go!

Some updates, finally

contact@newbiesparadise.com (speedking) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:56:09 +0100

First of all, we would like to apologise for the lack of updates these past few months. We were not organised, therefore couldn't work efficiently as a team.
The good news is, this is about to change for the better. We recently had some changes within the staff and you should see some good changes within the next few weeks.

Most of the PHP tutorial has been translated. I have just released the last parts of Chapter III, which are now available on the website:

Superglobal variables
This will explain everything you should know about super global variables, a more advanced form of variables.

Practical: Number of guests on-line
In this section you will be asked to create from scratch a script which will work out the number of guests on-line on your website.

Reading and writing in a file
This section talks about the basics of file creation and edition with PHP. It will also teach you the fundamentals of file permissions.

Chapter IV, which is the last, should be released within the next few weeks at a pace of 2-3 parts a week. After that, we will begin to release parts of the C/C++ tutorial.

Thank you for sticking around, and hopefully you will be seeing a lot of changes in the near future.

Part 3: new chapters released!

contact@newbiesparadise.com (ixM) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:23:22 +0100

Hi everyone!

And here we're back again with 4 (yes FOUR!) new chapters which under 2 practicals!

Let's make an overview of what you'll learn in these new lessons.

You might have already thought that you would like people to be able to interact with your website by entering their nickname and registering or by sending you a cool picture they've taken, or whatever needs to be sent from the users' computer to your website. The 3rd chapter is going to teach how to use HTML forms in order to do that!

As the title of the 3rd part said, it's time for you to unleash PHP's power! Every cool website has its own guestbook where one can leave a message to tell the webmaster that he'd enjoyed the website. Newbies Paradise has its own too, of course! But has your website one? No, then no doubt it won't last until this is not the case anymore. Here leads the way to the 4th chapter!

Then, the 5th chapter will teach teach you how PHP handles dates and time. The date() function is used everywhere you can see dates such as in a forum, in news items and so on.

Finally, the last practical will be about how to create your own news system. Remember how it was boring to update your source code whenever you wanted to add a news to your website? This time is definitely over now. Enjoy the most useful practical you've ever read!

Ok and that's all for now but stay tuned, I swear you that some more chapters will be available very soon!

See you

Part 3: two new chapters!

contact@newbiesparadise.com (ixM) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:33:17 +0100

Hello!

It is my great pleasure to offer you two more chapters of the PHP lessons. They are the beginning of the third part: "The full power of PHP". And this is not a lie. Although you've already discovered that PHP is a powerful language, you still don't know many very interesting things!

So, let's start with the first one. You will learn how to use one of the perhaps most useful function of PHP: include().
It is used in barely every website. It allows you to insert PHP code of one file into another. This is very useful for menus for example. Instead of copying the PHP code on each page where the menu is displayed, you simply use the include function to insert it where it belongs. Moreover, if you have to modify it, you'll only have to edit it once! Kinda interesting for you lazy programmers, isn't it?

The second one will teach you the use of many other PHP functions among which htmlspecialchars(), str_replace(), nl2br(). Let's make it clear: you won't be able to live without anymore!

So, why are you still reading this?!

LET'S GO!

The database: chapter 4 and practical released!

contact@newbiesparadise.com (M@teo21) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:34:30 +0100

Hi!

Once again, we are really happy to announce that we are releasing 2 new chapters today.

4) Writing data

After having seen how to read in the database, you'll learn how to write data. Simple actions will be taught : adding data, modifying data and deleting data.
This will then enable you to start using MySQL on your website.

The best way to see what you are able to do is practicing. So let's get into it!

5) Practical: creating a mini-chat

The second practical of our PHP tutorial will teach you how to create a mini-chat for your website. This is a good way to start using MySQL and PHP, because you'll be mixing the two for a challenging application.

PHP tutorial index

The next chapters will be the first ones of part III, which will contain lots of practicals. See you!

The database: chapters 2 & 3 released

contact@newbiesparadise.com (deshawn and M@teo21) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:50:08 +0100

Hi everybody!

As promised, here are some new PHP chapters: PhpMyAdmin and Reading data.
They will allow you to learn how to work on a database, as well as reading and organize your data, thanks to a pretty detailed chapter.

It is now only a matter of days before we release the last two chapters of Part 2 (including a practical), with which you will complete your knowledge of the database!

Obviously, I wouldn't fail to mention and thank those who worked on it: zamani, ixM, TiTophe, FFMx, jixer, speedking, jni.
I hope I'm not forgetting anybody...

Enjoy your reading!

[PHP] New chapter released

contact@newbiesparadise.com (deshawn and ixM) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:13:01 +0100

Hi everyone,

I'm very glad to release the next chapter of the PHP tutorial. We'll now try to release at least a chapter a week so you can enjoy reading the best tutorials in the whole world again.

The first chapter released is also the first chapter of the second part which will teach you how to use databases with both PHP and MySQL. Newbies Paradise, for example, uses a database to store users' data, messages of the forum and so on. A good website has to use a database to be really dynamic.

So enough chit-chat and let's go!

Enjoy!

Firefox 3 finally released!

contact@newbiesparadise.com (deshawn, Natim and yabberyabber) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:40:11 +0100

The Mozilla firm's leading product, although unknown a few years ago, has experienced a huge evolution since version 1.5 and is now offering the long-awaited version 3.
It has been done up like new, from the rendering engine to the interface (even though the latter hasn't changed so much).
Let's go through this new version together, and see what arguments it presents to convince all kinds of users.

A new rendering engine

Firefox's rendering engine (i.e the part of the browser enabling to transform HTML code into something that can be displayed), Gecko; was updated and is currently going through the Acid 2 test. So we can estimate that Firefox 3 is respecting the standards better than its predecessor.

However, Firefox cannot pass Acid 3 yet. It reaches 71% for this test. Note that the Acid tests 2 and 3 are not exhaustive and are being more and more criticized regarding their relevance.

An improved design

The interface is quite staggering, if we compare it to Firefox 2.
First, the default design is different according to the operating system you are using. There are even differences between the desktop managers under Linux.

Some Firefox 3 implementations

Next, we can notice that the personal toolbar (the toolbar containing the bookmarks) includes a button to return to the home page, and a folder listing the most visited pages, the pages booked recently, etc. This is enabled by the use of SQLite, a very light D.B.M.S. to handle the bookmarks.

We also observe the suppression of some dialog boxes, replaced by information bars, above the tab bar. Not only is it a bit less annoying but it also allows to validate the storage of a password once we are sure that it operates.

A new star-shaped icon appears next to the address bar. If the star is yellow, the page you are displaying is already bookmarked. If it is white, the page you are displaying is not. In this case, one click will do to bookmark it.

The download manager was improved as well, now featuring a search box. Besides, when typing a particular word in the address bar, we get all pages containing this word in their address listed. It allows to find a page recently visited more quickly.

Even more coming...

We have seen the major changes brought by Firefox 3, nevertheless there are others that you might be interested in:

A tab "catalog" makes its appearance in the plugin manager. This tab offers to download and install recommended plugins.
An improved support for colours.
A better font.
A full screen zoom that enlarges the whole page, including images, which was not the case before.
The history settings were rethought, to become more convenient and intuitive.
Better support for the <canvas> tag.
Increased security.
Support of the web applications when you are offline.
Firefox 3 is lighter and faster (it takes less room in the main memory) than Firefox 2.
A better management of plugins (you can activate or disable them as much as you like in the plugin manager).
The websites' identification button on the left of the address bar.
The multiple selection.

Bugs being fixed

One of the big problems for Firefox was memory leaks. On occasion, Firefox happened to consume high quantities of the main memory unnecessarily (apparently around 200Mo).

With Firefox 3, one of the developers' goals was to find and fix what created these memory leaks problems. More than 350 memory leak sources were found and fixed. So Firefox 3 is really less avid for main memory than its predecessors.

What about security?

Firefox 3 is also doing pretty well with security. First, the anti-phishing protection has been improved. From now on, you only have to click on the icon on the left of the address bar to know if the site has been verified or not.

Moreover, Firefox 3 also verifies if the sites you are browsing are not installing viruses, spywares, and other malevolent software programs. When you download a file, it automatically checks if the said file is not infected, using the anti-virus program installed on your system.

Firefox 3 and its world record

It has caused such a stir that it is almost impossible not to talk about it! Firefox 3 wanted to break (or establish) the record of the biggest number of downloads in 24 hours. The downloads counted for this record are those of the 17th of June of 2008, Firefox 3 release date.
On D-Day, as it was named, the downloads managed to reach the huge number of more than 8 million!

Conclusion

If you like Firefox, this new version will certainly suit you . If you don't know this browser yet (or if you'd rather use another one), it may actually make you change your mind. The memory leaks correction, its main drawback, is a very good thing.

However, some extensions for Firefox 2 remain incompatible with this browser.

Download Firefox 3