Our school, as many others, tries to force Visual Studio down your throat. Whatever, but I refuse to create a project for a tiny little useless program even if it is easy. So here’s what I found.

• Go to the Visual Studio folder on your START menu.
• Then go to Visual Studio Tools and choose Visual Studio Command Prompt.
• From that prompt change to the directory where your .cpp file resides and then run this command:
• cl /EHsc filename.cpp
• This will output a .exe and a .obj file. Success!

CakePHP Blog Tutorial

Introduction to CakePHP features (build an app in less than 15 minutes)

I would suggest starting with the Blog and then adding Teknoid’s Auth capabilities on top of it. I can honestly say for once that a framework API makes sense and I owe it to finally sitting down and doing both of these back to back.

Here’s a link to purchase the book:

http://www.amazon.com/Python-Programming-Introduction-Computer-Science/dp/1887902996

Also while we are at it… here’s a link to a blog about some great Python video lectures:

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/learning-python-programming-language-through-video-lectures/

I am currently reading PHP In Action by Dagfinn Reiersøl. I highly recommend this book to ANYBODY who hasn’t read it whether your a beginner or an expert php programmer. In it he lays out several object oriented principles one of which is YAGNI.  “You Ain’t Gonna Need It” also known as YAGNI is similar to the concept of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). Reiersol makes a case that if your project doesn’t need legs now it may never need legs, and that those legs even when seemingly just dangling there doing nothing, may get in the way of future enhancements. Once those legs do get in the way it’s hard to tell if any of that code is being used by pieces of your application tied to the implementation of those unused legs. I have a tendency of complicating my thoughts but the fact remains that if your not going to need it now it’s best to just leave it out of your project completely so as to not complicate future enhancements that build on or interface with the piece of your program that would contain those extra legs you weren’t quite sure if you would need in the future.

After playing with Ruby On Rails at the start of my programming life, then taking a close look at Django, I have been on the hunt for a good quality PHP MVC framework. I was very close to settling into CakePHP when I decided to take another look at CodeIgniter. Even with my somewhat limited experience in putting code onto paper, CodeIgniter’s documentation seemed to open it’s arms and pull me in. While I still haven’t done anything to write home to mom about, I thought I would share a few tutorials I found around the web for those interested in taking a look at CodeIgniter.

Tutorials

• http://godbit.com/article/introduction-to-code-igniter
• http://jamierumbelow.net/blog/the_guide_to_ci_databases/
• http://www.haughin.com/screencasts/
• http://www.developer13.com/blog/post/codeigniter-101-models

Libraries

• http://code.google.com/p/reduxauth/

I’ve included this link to the Redux authentication since the majority of web apps require some bit of authentication. I’ve read that this library may be more than what some apps may require. My thinking (and I’ve played around with it some) is that it’s not that difficult to implement so why not implement this now and allow for some wiggle room in case requirements change in the future. Also the Redux development seems to be quite active. For this reason, I feel comfortable that the Redux developers will quickly patch any security holes that may arise.

If this has helped anybody new to CI than I welcome you to check back as I am quite sure I will be frequently blogging about my CI experiences.

So who am I? Some of you may already know me and I think you for taking the time to check up on me. For the rest of you, my name is Josh Jenks and I reside in the sorry state of Michigan. I have a wife of 3 years (Together for a total of 10 YEARS! in September), Krystin, and a 4 year old son named Cameron. I’ll talk some more about them in depth at another time. More about me, I am currently finishing up a few classes at a community college. After that I will embark on my computer science endeavour at the University of Michigan-Flint. I’m shooting for a January start over there if I can work it out. Originally I planned to go the criminal justice route. However, I’m an OG Geek and I decided to settle back into my roots. I have my days where I look at that Calculus 2 class or the Physics class and wonder if maybe I’m a sucker for punishing myself. However, Computer Science has become a passion. I am currently working on slowly learning 2 languages (PHP and Python) and focusing as much as I can on language independent topics in between burying myself in code. Well I guess that pretty much explains who I am and why I’ve chosen to blog.