test please delete

[NickFitz]

Keep busy it's all good.

Nick as you're the master of coding can you recommend any good books on Python and Perl? I'm interested in mucking around with it.

For Perl, I would assume that the best are still O'Reilly's Learning Perl and Programming Perl (aka "The Camel Book") - Larry Wall, who invented Perl, is a co-author of both.

Not so sure about Python books; the online tutorial at python.org is good, as is Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Python - use the online edition as it's free, and probably more up-to-date. The Python Cookbook from O'Reilly is worth a look once you've got going.

If you're planning on using Python for web development, then you'll definitely want to use the Django framework - don't bother with the dead-tree book, as it's well out-of-date, such has been the pace at which Django has developed in the last year. Instead, there are good tutorial and reference sections on the site, there's more info in the wiki, and there's a lot of useful stuff on sites like Django Snippets - and a lot of other places.

[NickFitz]

Evening all

Ave Jog

Last day of gig today

[El_Diablo]

Evening

Benchbound although I have some internet marketing/SEO work lined up and business partner wants to launch internet marketing/SEO business as well

Plus Plan B can get some good attention as well, I'll look for another gig but I'd really quite like not to need one

First things first I will need a good few days off

Have a week or so off, do some Plan B and chat with your business partner.

Good luck for when you begin the search.

[Jog On]

Ave Jog

I'll be out of the city just in time to miss the riots tomorrow

Nick - as the master of coding - can you recommend me any good resources for learning CURL?

[El_Diablo]

For Perl, I would assume that the best are still O'Reilly's Learning Perl and Programming Perl (aka "The Camel Book") - Larry Wall, who invented Perl, is a co-author of both.

Not so sure about Python books; the online tutorial at python.org is good, as is Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Python - use the online edition as it's free, and probably more up-to-date. The Python Cookbook from O'Reilly is worth a look once you've got going.

If you're planning on using Python for web development, then you'll definitely want to use the Django framework - don't bother with the dead-tree book, as it's well out-of-date, such has been the pace at which Django has developed in the last year. Instead, there are good tutorial and reference sections on the site, there's more info in the wiki, and there's a lot of useful stuff on sites like Django Snippets - and a lot of other places.

Ta muchly Nick!

It's mainly for personal curiosity, I was speaking to a permie chap at ClientCo1, he was going to get me some info but he's gone off sick!

[El_Diablo]

I'm assuming cURL is this

Sorry for my ignorance, not a coder.

[Jog On]

I'm assuming cURL is this

Sorry for my ignorance, not a coder.

Yes - I want to use it for some web scripting such as:

To be able to automatically
extract information from the web, to fake users, to post or upload data to
web servers are all important tasks today.

Curl is a command line tool for doing all sorts of URL manipulations and
transfers, but this particular document will focus on how to use it when
doing HTTP requests for fun and profit.

http://curl.haxx.se/docs/httpscripting.html

[NickFitz]

I'll be out of the city just in time to miss the riots tomorrow

Nick - as the master of coding - can you recommend me any good resources for learning CURL?

The PHP manual section on CURL is actually fairly decent, assuming you understand the basics of HTTP.

Not sure what good resources on the basics of HTTP are - I tend to just read the HTTP 1.1 spec. At the end of the day, it's just requests and responses, which both have headers and (potentially empty) bodies. Requests have verbs like "GET" and "POST" which specify what you want the request to do; responses have status codes like "200 OK" and "404 Not Found" which tell you what happened.

Other than that, I'd recommend reading up on RESTful as opposed to RPC-like approaches.

If you want do the curl_multi stuff - whereby you can do multiple requests in parallel, assuming the server and network can cope - then the PHP docs aren't so good. If you want to get into that, this post by some bloke called Josh is a good place to start - I know, as that was what I was doing this afternoon, and I ended up copying most of his code

One final thing: assuming you're on Windows, download the free HTTP debugging app Fiddler. Fire it up, and in your code, set the CURL option CURLOPT_PROXY to 127.0.0.1:8888. (This assumes you're debugging on a server on the machine you're sitting at; if you're using another server on your local network, use your local IP address; if you're using a remote server, use the external IP address of your modem/router and configure port forwarding to send traffic to port 8888 on to the machine running Fiddler.)

Then, all of the CURL traffic will travel through Fiddler, which means you can examine the whole request-response cycle in detail. I've learned more about HTTP by actually looking at it going back and forth than from any tutorial. It's also invaluable for debugging. Just don't forget to remove that CURL option from your code before putting it on a remote server, or you'll spend hours trying to work out why it works on your machine, but not over there; or why it stops working when your machine goes to sleep

And on that note, I've just realised that the code I sent to the ClientCo chap a few minutes ago is still configured to use the proxy - I'd better send him another copy

[Jog On]

The PHP manual section on CURL is actually fairly decent, assuming you understand the basics of HTTP.

Not sure what good resources on the basics of HTTP are - I tend to just read the HTTP 1.1 spec. At the end of the day, it's just requests and responses, which both have headers and (potentially empty) bodies. Requests have verbs like "GET" and "POST" which specify what you want the request to do; responses have status codes like "200 OK" and "404 Not Found" which tell you what happened.

Other than that, I'd recommend reading up on RESTful as opposed to RPC-like approaches.

If you want do the curl_multi stuff - whereby you can do multiple requests in parallel, assuming the server and network can cope - then the PHP docs aren't so good. If you want to get into that, this post by some bloke called Josh is a good place to start - I know, as that was what I was doing this afternoon, and I ended up copying most of his code

One final thing: assuming you're on Windows, download the free HTTP debugging app Fiddler. Fire it up, and in your code, set the CURL option CURLOPT_PROXY to 127.0.0.1:8888. (This assumes you're debugging on a server on the machine you're sitting at; if you're using another server on your local network, use your local IP address; if you're using a remote server, use the external IP address of your modem/router and configure port forwarding to send traffic to port 8888 on to the machine running Fiddler.)

Then, all of the CURL traffic will travel through Fiddler, which means you can examine the whole request-response cycle in detail. I've learned more about HTTP by actually looking at it going back and forth than from any tutorial. It's also invaluable for debugging. Just don't forget to remove that CURL option from your code before putting it on a remote server, or you'll spend hours trying to work out why it works on your machine, but not over there; or why it stops working when your machine goes to sleep

And on that note, I've just realised that the code I sent to the ClientCo chap a few minutes ago is still configured to use the proxy - I'd better send him another copy

Nick - you are a legend and a gent

Many thanks (again!)

[NickFitz]

Ta muchly Nick!

It's mainly for personal curiosity, I was speaking to a permie chap at ClientCo1, he was going to get me some info but he's gone off sick!

Nick - you are a legend and a gent

Many thanks (again!)

Cheers chaps

Back at the hotel now - it's a lovely evening out there

If the weather's this nice tomorrow, and I leave work a bit earlier, I may take the opportunity to go for a drive in the Yorkshire Dales - they're only a few miles away.