Specific Principles of Design

Time to get serious about understanding design patterns: ordering GoF’s Design Patterns. While I had bought at one point the publisher’s three volume set on IP stacks back in the days when configuring routers and firewalls was part of my work-related responsibilities, I have only come across this book in mention once or twice. What has just tipped the purchase over the edge is an O’Reilly book Learning PHP Design Patterns. Can you believe that I got the book for $2 at Goodwill? Stopped in and picked up an intermediate PHP book and zipped through it on Thursday to see what changes have happened since version 4. Apparently a lot, including going fully OOP, which is a delightful development for the language. In the first few chapters, Learning PHP Design Patterns does an excellent job of explaining the general forms of object-oriented design at the same time instantiating the ideas in PHP. It’s always a lot easier when someone literally spells things out instead of having to toy around with a syntax to make code work. I have to add to the TTDL a DBMS table to store all of the different notes I’ve taken for Perl, HTML, VBA, C/C++, Lua, etc. I think the goal this weekend is just to put up some various notes on the site, and lay out a general design. I also need to install that PHP-based calendar and get that functioning. Oh, and download an app that can handle graphviz, and Snag-It on my PC…