Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

As I already mentioned earlier, I recently bought a brand new Nikon D80 and started with a new hobby: Photography. :) With this entry I'd like to share some first experiences in this direction. The D80 seems to be a very good camera, I'm really amazed about its poissibillities. It is the best non-professional Nikon camera, AFAIK, and might be even a bit oversized for a photo beginner like me. Until now I only had experiences with compact cams and the D80 is my first DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera. However, I'm very interessted in photography so I'm sure I will grow with this camery quite fast. The source of my interest are inspiring photographers in my surrounding: Derick, Sebastian, Marcus and most recently also Kore and Jakob. In addition, I love great photos and always wanted to be able to take those on my own. The final clincher was the experience with Kores D70s in Berlin.

To get started with started with the subject, Jakob recommended a great book to me, which I want to recommend to you now. The book is only available in German, AFAIK, so sorry to you English only readers. "Nikon D80 - Das Buch zu Kamera" does not only give a much more valuable overview on the D80 than the instructions manual does. It also gave me some good hints on what to pay attention for in photography and some technical background. Combined with practical use cases and helpful suggestions for custom settings and equipment, I'm still getting started with a great now hobby. If you like to get more info on this book, please take a look at my recension on Amazon (as soon as it is online).

You can be sure to read some more about my photography progress and to see some more of my pictures here in future. If you want to stay completly tuned, please subscribe to my photo stream on Flickr.

Since about a week, Kores and my first book is being shipped. As you can see below, we already got some examples and hope that everybody who ordered in advance got their examples by now, too. If you don't, stay tuned they should arrive soonish. We are both absolutly amazed by the priniting quality and the overall impression of the bookl. Many many thanks again to Stephan Mattescheck, our lector at Galileo Computing, for his great support and the amazing work of the whole team!

Any feedback about the book is welcome as a comment here, by email or you can seize the chance to meet us from Sunday to Wednesday (2007-11-03 to 2007-11-07) on the International PHP Conference near Frankfurt am Main.

On November 20th dynamic-webpages.de will start with the first "Professional PHP" online training. This series of online sessions offers you "24 hours of PHP knowledge, from professionals, to professionals". Topics covered in this series of talks are:

• Object orientation and patterns
• Regular Expressions
• Object-Relational-Mapping
• Security
• XML and Webservices
• Testing with PHPUnit
• AJAX and PHP
• Debugging using Xdebug
• Image manipulation
• PEAR
• Zend Framework
• eZ Components

Several speakers will take care about the different topics, among those are Kore Nordmann (Regex, Images and PHPUnit), Christian Wenz (Security, XML, Webservices), Stephan Schmidt for the OO and patterns section and other community known experts. I myself will present the topics "Xdebug" and "eZ Components".

All talks will last about 2 hours (possibly a bit longer) and will take place on a dedicated day so you are not too filled up with knowledge afterwards. The sessions are presented in German language using a professional online training system, that allows you to interact with the presenter and other attendees in writing and speaking.

Since it is the first time this course is scheduled, you will receive a 200,- € discount when booking right now, so take your heels and jump over to the dynamic-webpages.de training and certification page and save your seat!

The German "Linux Magazine" asked me a while ago to write an article about eZ Components for their special edition "Scripting 2.0" (dedicated to scripting languages). They published a shortened (and somewhat rephrased) version of the article online, as a teaser (German, of cause).

Update 2006-08-17:

I forgot that Wolfgang and me moved the dates for the sessions, because Wolfgang is on vacation and wants to take part in the sessions. Sorry for that! So, here are the correct dates:

After the highly successful first online session about eZ components, which I made in cooperation with dynamic-webpages.de, we decided to set up another one. Even better: This time we will have 2 sessions and both for free. As last time, the first session "eZ components I" will give a general introduction to our enterprise PHP library and will guide you to the usage of eZ components. You will learn all necessary basics to get started with eZ components supported development and get to know some interessting components, based on a simple example application. The seconde (new) session "eZ components II" will get into more detail on 2 important components, which are not covered in the first session: eZ Template and eZ Mail. I consider those as 2 of our most important and impressive components, so this looks very promissing. Beside that, the 2nd session will cover more components, that are not shown in the first part.

Since dynamic-webpages.de is a German website, the sessions will again be in German language. If you are interessted, you can simply register for taking part on dynamic-webpages.de and join us. It would be quite cool, to offer those sessions to an international audience, too. So, if you provide online seminars in a similar way, feel free to contact me about this!

Thanks a lot to dynamic-webpages.de for sponsoring the equipment and bandwidth again and to eZ systems for sponsoring my efforts!

I just finished my online session about our enterprise PHP 5 library eZ components, which was sponsored by dynamic-webpages.de and eZ systems. The talk went really good and more than 20 attendees followed my words around the general design of enterprise eZ components and my source code browsing session through our Gallery example application. I really had the feeling, that everyone was quite impressed and very satisfied with the session, at least I was.

So far Wolfgang and me already had a small chat regarding part 2 of this great event, which will probably deal with more components, especially Mail and Template. If possible, we plan to make it available for free again. So far, thanks to Wolfgang for initiating this all!

Have a nice weekend! :)

... I heard today at work ... a bummer that it's german ...

Wer glaubt, dass ein Projekt-Manager Projekte managt, der glaubt auch, dass ein Zitronenfalter Zitronen faltet.

I offered to Jan Lehnardt to support him in writing the PEAR Weekly News column on Zend. He didn't decline my offer and so, I will translate the news section weekly into german. Find the first issue translated here.