Re: PHP progress

[Jim Oberholtzer <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I installed 8.0 of the Zend Studio right over the top of RDP, so there 
is only one IDE open.  The answer to your question is yes, Zend Studio.  
Make sure you down load the i version so the licensing gets done 
properly.  The 8.0 professional version and the 8.0 i version are the 
same, just licensing differences.

As to making it fit, are you talking procedural programming or OO?  
Jon/Susan do a superb job of the procedural education, and a jump to the 
OO part is not difficult if you already have a strong understanding of 
OO.  I would start where you are comfortable and move from there.  I 
decided to do full OO with the Zend Framework from the start so while 
I've had some learning experiences, I've go the site almost ready to 
go.  Then again I have a background in Java to start with so it was not 
that hard to get the structure.

Guided tour:  Get a couple of books from APress.  I used "Zend Framework 
Techniques" by Forrest Lyman, and "PHP, Objects Patterns, and Practice" 
by Zandstra.    There are two foundational books that are very good as 
well, "Beginning Zend Framework" and "Beginning PHP and MySQL", both 
from APress.  Better yet these books come with a $10 companion book 
printed in PDF so you can copy/paste example code into your projects 
directly.

Consider the "IBM i Programmers Guide to PHP" by Jeff Olen and Kevin 
Schroeder.  This one is from MC Pressonline.

I would also take in a couple of Mike Pavlak's courses on the basics of 
administration for the Zend Server.

One last thing.  Make double sure you have a relational database name 
assigned to your database (not just localhost) since connecting directly 
to DB/2 from Zend is a breeze if the RDB entry is  there.  It can be a 
bit tricky without it.

Jim Oberholtzer
CEO/Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects, LLC


On 1/4/2011 2:17 PM, Buck wrote:
<snip>
> Hopefully, someone will point me to the Fine Manual where there's at
> least an outline of how an IBM i programmer alters his brain to make
> this 'fit'.  This is what I meant in the earlier thread about a guided
> tour.  I'll eventually get ad astra per aspera, but I'd rather have a
> less random experience.  At the moment my best guess is that someone
> will tell me to use Zend Studio.  Another Integrated Development
> Environment to install, manage and... integrate into my life.  Really?
>    --buck
</snip>