PHP at NECC

5:00 AM

Over the coming days, I am going to be writing short articles describing the activities that I am scheduled for at the National Educational Technology Conference (NECC) the end of this month. It promises to be an exceptional conference for many reasons. For me, personally, it will be my first experience with downtown Philadelphia. The more I hear about the city, the more excited I am, hoping to take lots of walks to see and experience as much as I can (on a budget).

But my first engagement, so to speak, at NECC will be a pre-conference workshop, Advanced Interactive Web Site Building with PHP (June 26). This will be a day-long, hands-on workshop on programming. PHP is a language that has been popular in Europe and Asia for years (First developed by Rasmus Lerdorf, a Danish-Canadian programmer, who is currently working for Yahoo Inc.). In the last couple of years, the language has taken off in the U.S. and is now reported to be running on one third of all domains. PHP, in a sense, is an add-on to HTML in that it can be written in with the HTML code giving a web page and extraordinary amount of interactivity.

PHP has the added advantage that it is a highly efficient and easy to learn language. Lerdorf says, “I really don’t like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code.”

This workshop is already full, but I look forward to other opportunities to teach it. As many of you know, I love programming. It’s like playing with legos, only you never run out of those little square, four-post pieces. 😉