Tag: Cross-platform software

php

I’m taking a class next fall on PHP.

The computer science department is offering a new course next fall called Web Programming with PHP. I’m signing up for it (if I can get the necessary over-rides) because I’ve wanted to learn PHP, but I don’t have enough discipline or programming experience to do it on my own from books. I have these ideas of things I want to do to enhance the user interface with our electronic resources, and I think that PHP will be a good first step towards gaining the knowledge I need to do implement those ideas.

linux for non-geeks

A new book published by No Starch Press.

Linux for Non-Geeks: A Hands-On, Project-Based, Take-It-Slow, and Have-Some-Fun Guidebook by Rickford Grant I received an email today from O’Reilly & Assoc. about this book. I’m on their mailing list for book announcements because I want to keep up with what’s new for computer geeks, since I’m the library liaison to the Computer Science department. This title caught my eye. I’m a bit of a computer geek, but I’m not very good at tinkering with programs or the OS, so my laptop has most of the out of the box configuration for the Corel distribution. Unfortunately, that distribution is no longer supported, and as a result, my kernel is very old (in terms of the age of Linux), and I can’t install most new programs developed for Linux. I’ve been toying with downloading some other distribution, but I haven’t found one yet that is non-geek friendly. If this book was written by the author for his mother, then I think it might be useful for me to at least get my feet wet. Maybe someday when my computer geekiness becomes so great that I dream in UNIX code I’ll look back at this entry and chuckle….

RSS application

Art Rhyno has created an RSS feed for his library’s new books list.

I had been attempting to puzzle out some coding to get an RSS feed automatically generated from our new books list, but time and a learning curve have prevented me from getting very far on it. I know what needs to be done, and I’m fairly certain that all I need is a little bit of Perl code. Since I have not really worked with Perl beyond tweaking the little bit I needed to tweak when setting up this blog, it would take me quite a bit of time to learn the language. In any case, it appears that Art Rhyno at the University of Windsor has already created an RSS feed for his library’s new books, and they use Endeavor Voyager, as well. I’m hoping he can help me out with a feed for my library. It would have been cool to do the programming myself, and I expect that even with Art’s help, I’ll still need to tweak it, but on the other hand, I don’t know if I’d ever get something programmed on my own.

Update:
Art responded to my comment with a link to the basic instructions on how to set this up. Cocoon? Modula-2? LISP? Maybe I need to re-think my desires to learn some programming. I suppose it will be good for me in the long run.

css.php