When Stanford first offered free online courses, I took a couple including Intro to DB. It's an online course and it was very informative and I learned a lot through it. I'm not sure when it starts next (and if you can just enroll whenever to see material), but here it is: https://class2go.stanford.edu/db/Winter2013/preview/

Keep in mind though: this is a full fledged college class, not some sort of YouTube tutorial or anything like that. If you want to follow it properly, be prepared to spend some time a week doing homework and following lectures.

In theory, very true. In practice, it's an uneasy feeling of switching to a new tool, no matter what it is. Unit tests exist and are useful, but I still haven't mastered writing bug-free code despite all the testing :)

I don't doubt that's the case, but as usual with these things - you probably use MySQL the least and are least comfortable with it. In the last 5-6 years, I only ever deployed significant projects on top of MySQL or PostgreSQL, and while PGSQL was always more capable (and I personally enjoyed using it much more), it's not like MySQL is crippled - it is a decent tool which gets the job done.

My point is: PostgreSQL is exciting and nice and loveable, but MySQL is here to stay - web developers will keep it alive for years to come. We use much worse tools everyday, don't we?

MySQL has too big of a momentum to just disappear (and the people keeping it alive are not governments and large banks, but rather web developers).

I'm a full-time web developer and I am just starting a new project and tossing a coin between MySQL and Postgresql. The reason why I am even considering MySQL is that all my existing code and libraries are thoroughly tested with it. Even brand spanking new projects use old libraries :)

In theory, database abstraction layer should be good enough to make everything work with pgsql, but it hasn't been tested. There are other reasons too, like other developers being uncomfortable with pgsql (namely sequences vs. mysql's auto incremented primary keys) as well as the fact that all of them will have to look for new tools for the alternative. Also, Mysql replication is very well established and easy to do and system administrators are part of the equation.

We just updated all our servers to Debian Wheezy which comes stock with MySQL 5.5, which with Innodb is half-decent. From what I see, it's still actively developed and I don't see it just disappearing... Oracle may be a place where open source software goes to die, but MySQL may change the trend.

There are several things involved:

Firstly, they need to get user's timezone. There are javascript methods to do this, but are not always reliable, especially if they don't want to depend on the client having javascript support. Of course, they could always just ask the user to pick the timezone, so that issue could be solved. E.g. Formula 1 solved it nicely, though I am not sure which method exactly they use (their javascripts are not obfuscated, but I can't be bothered).

Bigger issue, in my opinion, is showing exact time. Assuming their servers all keep exact time and that everybody is happy with their definition of the exact time (which is a big assumption to begin with), BBC would also need to take into account latency between server and client. E.g. it takes about 1/3 or 1/4 of a second for me to load a single random page with a GET request from BBC.

For an example of pain it takes to give users correct time, visit The official U.S. Time page. It's a java applet, presumably because anything client-side can't be trusted to actually count a second as a second. Granted, that page is ancient, but you can still see that it's not really trivial.

What you're seeing in Turkey is rejection of Western model of secularism which was advocated by Kemal Ataturk (yes, I'm intimately familiar with Turkish history going as far as early Ottoman empire for reasons I would rather not disclose here).

Knowing who Ataturk was and basics of his policies doesn't make you intimately familiar with Turkish history, it makes you well informed/educated (e.g. I know who Pinochet was, but know very little about Chilean history).

I am not disputing your knowledge, but your remark made you look a little full of yourself.

Just to compare prices worldwide, here in Serbia, I get fiber to home 20/10 for $28.20 and could get 120/60 for about about $70 (around 54 EUR). Gigabit plans are available ("where available") but prices are not advertised publicly. So, the prices they get in Lawrence, KS are as good as in third-worldish (for lack of a better word for a European country which is neither Switzerland nor a part of EU) Serbia, and I am not sure what to make out of it...

I took a look at the tests for the Zend App Controller once. It had six separate functions to reset parts of the global state. Some classes from Zend may be useful, but I couldn't recommend it as a complete solution to anything.

I presume you are talking about Zend Framework 1? I stayed clear from it, but I just started playing around with ZF2 and so far it looks nice. It gives impression of over-engineered framework, but after a couple of days with it, it's actually very powerful. I am still to start writing unit tests for it, but it looks like they gave it a lot of thought and that it will be very usable.

PHP is not getting a lot of love, especially here on Slashdot, and Drupal is one of the reasons to blame. Sure, PHP has its fair share of design flaws, but ever since version 5, it's a decent enough language to code in and can get a lot of done.

The problem is with Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla and other very popular CMSs and frameworks which are all a strange mix of procedural and oo code, and lack a proper distinction between model, views and controllers.

Its problems are certainly not the things that are often quoted, like mysql_real_escape_string (which just follows C api and is deprecated anyway), or inconsistent naming conventions. The problems are deeper - things like lack of threads comes to mind.

Still, the reason why I like PHP is that with a good framework (e.g. Zend Framework 2 is promising, but there is also CakePHP, FuelPHP, CodeIgniter, etc.) you can build a very solid application. Procedural PHP is actually a fantastic and very powerful template engine and otherwise you can write relatively clean and easy to read code in it if you structure the program correctly. It's very simple to deploy (especially compared to e.g. RoR) and has extensions for pretty much any database or graphics library or anything else a web developer may need.

I second this. TeamViewer is a fantastic piece of software, and best of all it's cross platform, so whichever combination of OS's you and your mom have, it will work. You can even do it from a tablet or a phone and it's pretty much zero configuration, no need to set up forwarding on the router, etc.

I needed to use Windows only e-banking and borrowed an unused laptop from with Windows 8 on it - great chance to see what the fuss was all about, especially since it was stock installation and nobody has used it before.

First impressions were good: I figured out I can click on Desktop box in the Metro UI and I started Internet Explorer from the taskbar (if I needed some other app, though, I have no idea how I would go about it).

Then I wanted to turn off the machine. But I really couldn't figure out how. I realized that if I move the pointer of the mouse to the right, I get some sort of a menu. And screen edge detection is completely unintuitive when using a trackpad! Anywho, once I was back on the Metro thingy, I started Mail, just to see how it looks like. It wasn't setup, so it took me another 10 minutes to figure out how to leave the wizard without taking the battery out of the laptop!

When I finally got back to the Metro thingy, I couldn't find desktop, because things were rearranged!

Then it took me 10 more minutes to figure out how to shutdown the darn thing. The trick was to logout and then find an icon to do it.

I fear the day when some aunt is going to call me and ask me to fix her Windows 8 machine. I honestly won't have any idea what to do with it!

As a web developer, I should be happy about this development, but the fact is: Opera was always standards compliant and as a user I liked how it rendered pages (qucikly and without any white screen gaps between page loads).

But it probably makes sense for them. Webkit is solid and their costs will probably go down dramatically.

Being a programmer and not understanding English is like being a historian writing papers on the Roman Empire and not knowing Latin. There is a lot of programmers out there who don't understand English or are not comfortable with it, but as a rule, they are not that good.

You have to learn our profession somehow. Yeah, you can learn C or Java from a book written in your native language, but most APIs out there are documented only in English. If you don't speak English, then your resources are severely limited.

That being said, if you can do localization, do it. Localization is usually very easy and doesn't require much bloat. You can have volunteers do the actual translation, you just need to get the strings ready, so it shouldn't be more than a couple of hours of your time.

Some talented programmers are just not talented for learning languages, or prefer to have UI in their own language. They are the ones who Google Translate documentation online, so you'll be doing them a favor.

Like everybody else already noted, knowing English is sufficient for programmers these days, but there is no harm in knowing another language. As you are an American and already speak the lingua franca, choose one that you can actually learn. If you take on e.g. Japanese or Arabic, keep in mind just how hard they are for an Indo-European native speaker. Furthermore, how much practice can you get in those languages? Learning a new language properly requires practice.

I would suggest a romance language: Spanish or Italian. If you start learning one of them, it will be relatively easy to switch to another one (e.g. if you suddenly start working with Brazilians and you already speak Spanish fluently, switching to Portuguese would take little effort). Also, both languages are easy to learn and are used in somewhat developed economies. A lot of development nowadays is outsourced to South America, so you can have practical use for it.

Finally, don't to what most people try to do: you can't learn a language from audiobooks or books. You will need to take classes - at least two or three times a week. A classroom setting is the second best way to learn a language. The best way to learn a language is a classroom setting in a country where that language is spoken by the majority of the people.

If you are buying your bread in a bag, you are doing it wrong.

Best tasting bread, in my opinion, is bought in bakery and has 4 ingredients: flour, yeast, salt and water.

Sorry, I posted too soon: actually, early US citizenship would solve the problem that I mentioned. If people had it, then they wouldn't have to worry about losing their job (they'd just go and find another one and use their savings meanwhile). Then again, if I had it my way, we'd all be citizens of the Earth and we wouldn't have to worry about pesky things such as visas no longer. But most people don't like that idea for some reason...