Video Tutorial - AJAX in PHP

Derek Allard made an interesting video tutorial on how to use AJAX within the CodeIgniter PHP framework to create a cool web application with AJAX flavored search capabilities. Derek makes use of Scriptaculous to incorporate AJAX capabilities into this tiny web application.

Two-Level Menu with PHP

Here is how to make a dynamic database-driven two-level menu with PHP.

Speaking SQL

Speaking SQL looks like an interesting SQL tutorial that starts at the vry beginning yet goes deeper than many other SQL tutorials.

Python Tutorial

Python is an object oriented scripting language used for developing web applications. It is not as popular as PHP, yet it's code is neater and cleaner. Google uses Python extensively in its web applications. Here is a basic python tutorial for new comers to this cool scripting language.

What Makes an Excellent Tutorial?

I got across this CSS tutorial by chance while Googling around for a specific CSS question. The tutorial explains how to make a horizontal menu by styling an HTML list using CSS.

What I really loved about this tutorial was the method by which it guided you through the steps. It's really an excellent example of what a good tutorial should be made of. First of all, it follows a gradual approach to building the final thing. It goes only one small step at a time. It uses very simple, short and clear titles for each step. It shows how the outcome of each step would look like. Finally, it shows the code needed for each step, clearly pointing out the newly added code in that step with a different color. Googling through this tutorial was a peaceful and lovely trip, I didn't even need to read the instructions written in it, just following the title of each step, the code and its highlighted section and seeing the outcome of that step was enough to make me understand and absorb all the information. Hands up for this tutorial. I hope others creating tutorials would use this one as an ideal model for how excellent tutorials should be done.

A Crash Course in Smarty

I liked this Smarty crash course. Smarty is popular PHP template engine. It has many elements of a good tutorial. It is direct and to the point. It also shows side by side the code and output of that code. This way of illustration is an excellent one for the brain.

CakePHP Tutorial

IBM has an interesting tutorial about CakePHP, the popular PHP framework. I usually like IBM tutorials because they are clear and easy to follow.