Day 3 of Workshop

Friday, March 28th, 2008

So just returned from Day 3 of the Web Design and Development Workshop. Today we started with the core PHP language constructs. The syntax of PHP matches very much with C/C++ and students should not have problems understanding this very simple but exhaustive, beautiful language. Yesterday I taught them about Interpreters and Compilers, the basic difference between them and their implementation, the server-client model and lots of other stuff.

Teaching using chalk and duster on the board is something very traditional and today I felt it. I switched off the projector and took the chalk to teach them about the language constructs, well what to teach? It matches C++ :)

Ankur got some pics from his mobile camera, where you can see me explaining on the board and in the last pic sitting comfortably and giving lectures ( inspired by our OS teacher)

Web Design and Development Workshop

Friday, March 21st, 2008

So here goes the fourth event of LUG Manipal which will make a special stamp on the history of this newly founded organization. Firstly clubs/organizations in MIT charge hefty amount of sum for attending workshops and all such events where they teach all shit.

What they teach? HTML, CSS using Dreamweaver! OMG! What is so special about it? I feel like banging my head on the wall when people fall prey to these traps. Dreamweaver is an advanced IDE and people go to attend these workshops thinking that its another new language, only to get disappointed. At max they might teach ASP for a server-side scripting even at the days of ASP.NET. All old and useless technologies of these days! Such pathetic situation.

First I want to make it clear that LUG would not take a single penny from its members for any event as registration fees or event fees. If we do anything that costs us, we gladly inform our members about the same and ask them to make their own accomodation. Here too we are organizing a Web Design and Development Workshop for all the students of Manipal. No registration is required, no charges, it all free! All that’s required is commitment.

We will be teaching Open source Web Development Technologies like LAMP/WAMP. We are hoping to give more preference to LAMP. Now question comes why PHP? Just because its one of the best scripting languages and best when it comes to Open Source web scripting language. Why MySQL? Well there is no other alternative and MySQL just rocks. If you are not satisfied better use MS SQL or Oracle if you have enough powerful hardware, PHP supports both of them. But the feel which you would get with MySQL is difficult to achieve on other database softwares. Why Apache? Its the uncrowned king of webservers. Its deployment is around 70-75% of the servers around the world. What else reason you need? Why Linux? To get the real server like feel, using file permissions, PHP and MySQL are specially optimized for running over Linux.

One more question comes into play is Why not ASP? Its not an open source technology and for me its vastly inferior to PHP, no comment on ASP.NET as I havnt used it. What buggs me most is that many people dont know about PHP and ask questions like “What is PHP? I think ASP is more powerful than PHP“. I ask them have you tried? Then how can you say this? They are dumb-struck! PHP has so many third party extendibility like hundreds of frameworks, Templating Engines, PEAR like packages and many many more. There is simply no end to this great programming language. Thanks Rasmus for your creation.

And Yeah! I forgot to mention that the poster was designed by my friend Aavik! Designing a colour poster is a bit easier than designing a black and white one. Using 8-bit grayscale is somewhat challenging and he did it.