Java 2-15-2013

Here's a status update on my studies. I've been using a practice exam check my aptitude after reading the study guide. I'm at chapter 3 Decision Constructs. In order to put my all into this, I have some ideas on how to do that.

• Progress through at least one chapter a week
• Read up on the topics discussed in the book
• Code in Java on projects large and small
• Read about issues in the Java programming community

Java

I just got a Kindle for Christmas and that by far has become one of my favorite studying tools. It's super portable and lightweight. I have loaded a few texts on java to the Kindle and it works beautifully. I was also surprised at the battery life. It just goes for hours.
Now that I am focusing on Java, I also re-installed Eclipse on my laptop so I can work a project with it. I might get back into working on an Android program.

Java and PHP

Well my friend is working pretty hard on learning Java and I want to join him. He has been using it for years and now wants to get ceritified with OCA SE7. That is something I would want as well. In fact, I want that a great deal. That is why I will merge my studies of PHP with Java for the time being and work towards getting certifications in both languages. Albeit, the issue of time is especially sensitive right now. I will need to give everything I have to working on this. I don't necessarily have to push myself to get the certifications right away. My plan is to work with my friend on the Java studies and also learn about PHP on the side.

Update

While learning about the PHP CLI, I began to wonder what exactly I could do with it. PHP has been used almost exclusively for web development. If there are uses for it besides that, I would be curious about it. Here are some articles from the php.net manual and some published materials from different sites on that.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-command/

Update 12-17-2012

Here are the things I learned and were intriguing from PHP materials.

• ^ the symbol for either or. It's pretty underused, I find.
• $1 .= "string" concatenates "string" with the previous value of $1.
• Types of loops: while, do-while, for, foreach, continue, break

Here are some good videos on youtube. Here

I was trying to figure out how to use the CLI available after version PHP 4.3.0. Since I have an Ubuntu setup on my laptop, I'll just use that for my testing purposes. The one extra installation I need to run CLI commands is the php-cli package. It's pretty straight forward. After that all I have to do to run scripts is to type in "php /path/script.php" and it will run script.php.

I realize that this is not a lot of progress in a span of two weeks. I need to quicken the pace of my updates and stay focused on this.

Update: 12-04-2012

It's been kind of hectic lately. I've gone through the first part of the PHP study guide provided by zend. I'm not even close to finishing what I set out to do in the 1st benchmark. There are other priorities as well that I have to worry about. The 70-680 Microsoft certification might be respectable, so I will keep going through the material. Being knowledgeable about the most popular OS in the world doesn't hurt.

1st benchmark

I want to right away get started in understanding firmly the basics of PHP and be able to talk about it. Topics include syntax, coding trivia, functions, looping options, .htaccess and php.ini files. The last topic .htaccess and php.ini files is kind of prevalent in my job right now because I have to handle issues with access and controlling the way PHP is used. I'm going after things I am interested most of all. Gotta keep the passion alive.

One last thing I found interesting while reading the beginning of the PHP manual is command line usage of PHP. Sounds like I can tie that into my text processing hobby.