It seems everyone is talking about the cloud and CDNs nowadays, pushing terabytes of data and trying to squeeze every millisecond of performance from their websites. Using a Content Deliver Network, or CDN, is a great and inexpensive way to speed up any site. If you think your site is too small for CDN, you are almost certainly wrong. CDNs greatly improve the speed up your site, creating a great user experience that every visitor to your site deserves, regardless of how small your site may be. More recently, speed has also become important for Search Engine Rankings, with Google… View full post »
PHP Caching Solutions: Best of the Pack
November 23rd, 2011 Leave a comment 2 commentsSite performance versus traffic: it is a tough battle to fight. When working with PHP applications we usually have to face this issue sooner or later, as a site becomes more popular it can begin to suffer from performance issues. There are several ways that you can improve your site’s performance to help solve this problem, but one of the easiest ways is to set up PHP caching. PHP Caching is an excellent solution for Web sites that wish to improve their site performance by allowing their dynamic pages to be stored client-side by your application. These solutions… View full post »
Kanban Book Review
November 22nd, 2011 Leave a commentBook Author: David J. Anderson As a techie, I have always freely admitted that my skills lay more in the nitty-gritty of system administration and software development. I’m vastly more comfortable setting up a Linux box or throwing up a quick Python script for management than I am actually being management; when it comes to complex development processes and control of varied workflows, I’m more lost than a bat in the sunlight. That said, David Anderson’s book Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business was a welcome addition to my bookshelf. It really slims down the overbearing ideas of software development… View full post »
Java Interview: Coding Questions and Answers
November 21st, 2011 Leave a comment 6 commentsInterviewing for a job can be stressful, but if there is one thing that can add more complexity to the interview process, it would be the technical interview. Nothing strikes fear in the heart of developers faster than the thought of sweating hands and an interview’s stare as you struggle through a coding problem on a whiteboard. This is the stuff of nightmares. It is natural for you to fear this process since many programmers, new and veteran alike, have doubts about their coding abilities. The best thing you can do is prepare yourself for what is to… View full post »
VPS.NET Review – One Year Later
November 15th, 2011 Leave a comment 15 commentsWe’ve been hosting Learncomputer.com on VPS.NET for slightly over a year now, and I wanted to share my experience with this provider, as well as compare it with our previous web host, HostGator. Moving between web hosts is always a challenging task, so one must tread carefully when choosing one so as to avoid any unnecessary hassles down the road. By now, I am convinced that there is no “perfect” web host, but some definitely try harder than others. Is VPS.NET one of them? Read on to find out. When we launched our business in 2008, we had chosen HostGator… View full post »
jQuery Quick Tutorial
November 14th, 2011 Leave a comment 1 commentWhether you are new to JavaScript or have been developing for the Web for a while, learning jQuery can seem like a daunting task. If you have been wanting to give it a try, here is a quick primer to give you the facts and help you get started along with some examples for you to try out. If you want to play with the examples from this tutorial, feel free to download them from here. What is it? jQuery was originally developed by John Resig of the Mozilla Software Foundation in 2006 with the motto of “Write less, do more”…. View full post »
PHP Profilers Compared
November 10th, 2011 Leave a comment 3 commentsWhether you are an experienced developer or just getting started it is important to know how to measure the performance of your scripts and applications so that you can learn to make improvements and optimizations to your code. There are several tools available, both commercial and free, that will allow you to make these kinds of measurements in your environment. Some tools are very simple and only look at log times to determine how long a request has taken; others have more features and offer full application profiles, query analyzers and execution plans. This article compares two… View full post »
How HTML5 Improves the Semantic Web
November 8th, 2011 Leave a comment 1 commentFor some time, web designers and developers have been talking about the “semantic web”. Ever since table based design went out the window, there has been an emphasis on using CSS to create semantic class names to mark up elements in a way that described the content and not the presentation. This is really an extension of the idea of separation of presentation and content. In “semantic” web design, HTML div tags are used to create the various blocks of content. The CSS class names are created to describe the contents. As a result, you… View full post »
Best Java Books: My Top 5 Choices
October 21st, 2011 Leave a comment 1 commentWith Android being at the forefront of mobile phone use and growing every day, Java has enjoyed a great deal of popularity as a language that’s very handy to know in today’s IT world. Unfortunately, it is not always so easy to figure out which books are best for learning Java, so we’ve taken the liberty of choosing a few that we think will make your Java learning experience smooth and enjoyable! Effective Java By Joshua Bloch In Effective Java, Joshua Bloch does one thing extremely, extremely well: he lays out best practices that every developer should follow regularly. The whole book has… View full post »
Hadoop: Where, Why, and is It Right for YOU?
October 12th, 2011 Leave a comment 1 commentHadoop has become something of a buzzword in recent months; everyone and their boss is recommending it for everything, books are being written about it left and right, and there are precious few ideas or things one can mention about Hadoop without running into someone else who has other opinions about that very subject. Hadoop is regarded as the new way of doing things, and many corporations and enterprise IT departments are researching just how to fit Hadoop into their infrastructure. With all this buzz about Hadoop, you may be tempted to run off and implement it in your own organization…. View full post »
HTML5 Editors: 5 Best Tools for Web Developers
October 2nd, 2011 Leave a comment 1 commentWith HTML5 quickly becoming widely accepted in today’s online arena, the HTML4 editors of yesterday are no longer up to the task of providing the most cutting-edge development environment possible. Finding a replacement, however, can be quite a task: fortunately, we’ve gone out and found a few HTML5 editors for you to get your HTML5 development going and keep on the cutting-edge of Web creation! 1. Mercury HTML5 Editor The first tool on the list is interesting in that it’s also written in HTML5: talk about enforcing the no-legacy route! Mercury HTML5 Editor is a web-based editor in the style of TinyMCE… View full post »
NetApp Certification Options
September 30th, 2011 Leave a commentIn the world of certifications, there are generally a few that are common knowledge among the general IT networking world: Cisco’s CCNA and CCSP certifications, for example, are known to the majority of the IT world, as are certifications like Microsoft’s MCP program or the A+ certification for desktop support specialists. There are, however, other certifications out there that are definitely worth looking at; certifications that, while not as well-known as some of the above, are great certifications that will help you specialize in a field or niche that you’re interested in: One of these, for example, is NetApp; they specialize… View full post »
Hadoop with Hive
September 19th, 2011 Leave a comment 10 commentsNowadays, there are lots of Hadoop emerging. Indeed, by “Lots of Hadoop”, I mean companies releasing their own versions of Hadoop (e.g. Cloudera) by building a layer over the original Apache Hadoop distribution. We can also call these “customized” versions of Apache Hadoop. But when we think about the core part, it remains the same across different Hadoop flavors. Apache Software Foundation (ASF) focuses on improving Hadoop by bringing many smaller sub-projects under it to facilitate open source tools development around Hadoop. Hive happens to be one of Hadoop’s more prominent child projects. Hive is a data warehouse infrastructure, initially developed… View full post »
Section 508 – The Web Accessibility Act: What is It?
September 9th, 2011 Leave a comment 1 commentThe very first question many web designers ask when “Section 508″ is mentioned comes back at me with this: “What the heck is Section 508?” The reaction is understandable, given the rather understated publicity Section 508 has received in the web design world; I myself only learned of its existence a few years ago, even though the law was signed into effect by President Clinton in 1998. There hasn’t, at least in my experience, really been a push for awareness or compliance for accessibility in many private websites, and so far the vast majority of Section 508 compliant websites seem to… View full post »
Test Driven Development: By Example Book Review
September 8th, 2011 Leave a commentBook Author: Kent Beck I have to admit, the very first thing that drew me to Kent Beck’s book Test Driven Development: By Example was his casual, easy writing style. While his audience is clearly not the faint of heart (Beck isn’t preaching to initiates; those without a prior knowledge of programming very definitely need not apply), Beck doesn’t assume the role of an automaton, much like some other software development books tend to do. Beck is casual and funny, a breath of fresh air in a book genre that’s often coma-inducing in style. That said, Beck’s book isn’t being reviewed because… View full post »




