Adventure in the Middle of the Snake Pit: PyCon Philippines 2014

It was only recently I realized how lucky I am to have attended the two-day PyCon Philippines 2014, the Python community conference, at the De La Salle University, Manila.

The two-day conference gave me the opportunity to again meet or see some of the IT personalities I respect and highly regard in the industry like Edison Go Tan, Evan Dale Aromin, Zak Elep, and Alvin Edwald Chan and Brian Paul Samson, both were volunteers and organizers of the event.

It's also been fortunate of me to have met Jayr Anes, coincidentally also a graduate school student at Polytechnic University of the Philippines.

Web Application Development with Yii and PHP: A Book Review

We were again graced by Packt and was given the opportunity to review the second edition of Web Application Development with Yii and PHP by Jeffrey Winesett, which was released November 2012. Wait! What?! That is really 2012 and no typographical error, almost two years from now. You might be shouting expletives if I seem pulling your leg and reviewing a book over a year old.

When I double checked with the official Yii Framework website, it turns out that this book is for the Yii Framework version 1.1.12 which is about two versions away from the current version (version 1.1.14 as of this writing). What's so special about this book is that the Yii framework starting with version 1.1 is supported until December 2015. That means you get this book as an investment resource for Yii Framework 1.1.x development, and that means it's relevant now and beyond, make that 3 years after this book is published.

The Fantastic Adventure at Infanta Quezon a.k.a. Becoming a Seminar Resource Speaker

I was fortunate to be asked to participate as seminar resource speaker on network and enterprise security; thus, an adventure in Infanta, Quezon ensued, particularly in ACTS Computer College, owned and managed by Mr. Ernesto Lim who I was fortunate to have met and spoken with after conducting the seminar.

Book Review of "Zend Framework 2 Cookbook"

First off, a pop quiz: what does "Lord of the Rings", "Star Wars", "Godfather", "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "Toy Story" and Jason Bourne have in common? If you answered these were examples of a trilogy in cinema or literature in one way or another, you have my congratulations.

Speaking of trilogies, this article is my third book review for Packt. We were given the opportunity to review the "Zend Framework 2 Cookbook" by Josephus Callaars, of which we will refer to as ZF2 Cookbook.

Highlights of the ZF2 Cookbook include in-depth discussion of and chock-full of code on internationalization, mail handling using PHP, forms, validators and view helpers, in-depth discussion of views and related design patterns, more extensive exploration of databases using PDO (not just MySQL), modules, models and services, authentication, exception handling, dependency injection, performance optimization and bug management; quite a hefty lot for a 340 page cookbook.

Add to the mix the previous books I reviewed- the "Mobile First Bootstrap" and "Zend Framework 2 Application Development", get all three and you'll be in web development ecstasy.