Online PHP book

I have high hopes for this online book, finding it a good read so far:
http://www.tuxradar.com/practicalphp

PHP - where's the code?

I had an amusing exchange with another programmer recently, he is looking into Drupal at the same time I was looking at Joomla! It wasnt a religious flame war, more a mutual moan.
"Dont know quite what to make of PHP" I said. "Yeah" he said. "Its great of course, but its not really like a programming language"
"Cant find structure" I said. "Must be there but dont see it yet"
"And where's the code?" he said.

And so it goes on. I dont know why I have such a problem, I even get Rails to some extent, and PHP is very reminicent of ASP and JSP -- I suppose its so long since a single line of script to run a GIF of a little man running around a box was a big deal that very short snippet of mark-up no longer does it for me as a persuasive argument. Still, lots of big site run PHP so I'm going to stick with it a while longer in search of enlightenment

WCF - a link to a link!

A link to WCF screen-casts by Michele Bustamente
http://www.simonrhart.com/2007/12/wcf-tutorials-and-resources.html
You have to register and they only run on IE 6 and above but might be worth a look if you prefer screencasts to just reading

A day of Ruby

Yesterday was a Day of Ruby. I'm impressed again -- previously my reaction to Ruby and Python has been ugh, more Smalltalk clones, back to the future again! But having warmed up this time, I get it a bit more -- some of the features, such as mix-ins, seem so natural that it's hard to believe they are not in more conventional languages, and never mind the excellent technical reasons why they are not.

Joomla

Wednesday I successfully installed Joomla! on top of the XAMPP stack on Windows XP, following the video tutorial
http://www.veoh.com/collection/screencasts/watch/v1802750A7Mnpe7z
Impressed. By both the tutorial and Joomla itself -- pretty painless compared to (cough, cough) Sharepoint - which needs win 2003 server in the first place