Do you R & D?

[davidjam]

Just wondering what you busy people do for R & D (that's Research and Development, NOT Relax & Drink!).

First of all, I find it hard to stick to any kind of regime. Like I know I should put 15 min. to half hour a day into something!? Got half way through the Meyer CSS book and had to return it to the library, but even if I had it again, would I stick with it? Also was working on the Hudzilla manual and ditched that after a while. I mean I have no discipline!!

The problem is this: I went through the php.net manual and did almost everything except for the functions. Then what happens is I go merrily along writing scripts and doing all these clumsy work-arounds that could be so much better achieved with the many wonderful php functions. But do I take the time to learn them?? noooooo :bemused:

[pohopo]

My R&D, for PHP, is I read posts made here and the answers people provide. I learn all types of great things from them. I will look at an answer to a question and go 'wow, that is a good idea'. I then take that idea and incorporate it in what I do.

[goldbug]

Depends on how much free time I have. I'm currently reading maybe 6 books concurrantly (no not literally at the same time--maybe parts of 2-3 per day), but they've been sitting gathering dust for a couple months due to workload. Why read in parallel, versus serially?--I don't get too burned out on one specific book that way, and I've found it easier to finish them. Some O'Reilly books though, are hard to get through no matter what I do... but that's the nature of those: more reference than anything else. The downside to reading a selection: I find it hard to force myself to read the more "boring" subjects, and are pulled towards the "fun" stuff.

As far as the "D" goes... I'm usually doing the above "R" for some silly purpose I've convinced myself of, but just simple tinkering can get a lot of ideas out... and a lot of times builds into something more substantial.

Hrmm...was that too off-topic? :/

[Drakla]

Definitely R&D. I honestly think the best resource for researching PHP is the chm of the manual, especially if you've got a laptop so you can read it in bed, or in the bath (I put it at the side of the bath on a chair, but do bath for 1 1/2 hours).

Just look through the function reference, but in the sections that you think might be useful, obviously you don't look at every single type of database extensions.

I find it really gets you into the point, and you don't have to slog through all the awful guffing of something like the Luke and Laura Welling book that people seem to love. This might be because I'm coming at it from already being a programmer, though, so just need to know how to jiggle my syntax - but I do plenty of that in the bath anyway.

Me joke-o!

[davidjam]

Another great resource are the user notes at the bottom of the php.net manual pages. I was just looking further into is_numeric() (coudn't believe how many user notes there were for that one) and found this from someone named mjbraca:

Some examples. Note that leading white space is OK, but not trailing white space, and there can't be white space between the "-" and the number.

is_numeric("1,000") = F
is_numeric("1e2") = T
is_numeric("-1e-2") = T
is_numeric("1e2.3") = F
is_numeric("1.") = T
is_numeric("1.2") = T
is_numeric("1.2.3") = F
is_numeric("-1") = T
is_numeric("- 1") = F
is_numeric("--1") = F
is_numeric("1-") = F
is_numeric("1A") = F
is_numeric(" 1") = T
is_numeric("1 ") = F

This is stuff you don't get in any manuals or books. Normally you have to spend hours in frustrated agony wondering why you get all kinds of strange app. behaviours. Great resource.

[AstroTeg]

The user notes provided on php.net are some of the best I've ever seen. And I really really wish more folks would implement this feature (especially for ASP!). There's a lot of golden nuggets on php.net if you can scan through the messages to pick them out.

For me, R&D is dreaming up of things to do and running with them. I try to pick things that are just beyond my reach in terms of coding. Most times they're silly little things that only take 30 minutes to an hour. Other times they're a full blown web app.

Every now and then I look at the table of contents in the PHP manual on php.net. Its fun to pick a topic that I have no clue about and playing with the available functions.

I think for the D part, it helps to have people around to show off the work you've done. "Dude, check this out! [link]" is what I'll do to some of my friends a lot of times. The feedback is what drives me...

[vaaaska]

About a year ago I started documenting some RD things informally. Making a folder with a descriiption of what I was trying to do (parseText) and then do some exercises. Oftentimes, cutting and pasting both the exercises and the user contributed notes has been a really easy way for me to understand just how things work.

I say informally because it would be really easy to get too obsessive about documenting these things and that's something I don't have the time or patience.