functions

LESS Is More: Make Your CSS Coding Easier with LESS

18 May 2011 / 8 Comments

In recent years, CSS has matured into a very powerful way to style web pages. It’s now possible to create a website’s look almost entirely in CSS, with minimal use of images.

This is great, but one drawback is that CSS stylesheets are becoming longer, more complex, and harder to manage. It’s not uncommon for a typical stylesheet to run into hundreds of lines of code, with a large number of interdependent rules.

For this reason, various dynamic stylesheet languages are starting to spring up. These allow you to write your CSS rules using a more flexible, powerful language that is then turned into regular CSS for the browser to interpret.

In this article you’ll learn how to use LESS, an increasingly popular dynamic CSS language that you can use to streamline your CSS coding, saving you time and effort.

PHP Recursive Functions: How to Write Them, and Why They’re Useful

4 February 2011 / 9 Comments

Like most programming languages that support functions, PHP lets you write recursive functions. In this tutorial, we’ll explore the concept of recursion in PHP, and discover how to create recursive functions for various tasks.

Recursion is one of those topics that can seem confusing at first, but once you start writing recursive functions you’ll see how elegant recursion can be!

PHP Variable Scope: All You Need to Know

15 October 2010 / 6 Comments

When you’re just starting to work with functions and objects in PHP, variable scope can be the cause of some confusion. Fortunately, PHP’s scope rules are relatively easy to understand (compared to some other languages, at least!).

In this tutorial you’ll learn all you need to know about variable scope in PHP. You’ll look at:

The concept of variable scope — what it is, and what it means
The differences between global and local scope
How to access global variables from within a function
PHP’s superglobals, and how they work
How to use static variables to preserve state

Let’s get started!

Make Your Own PHP Functions: The Newbie Guide

16 September 2010 / 4 Comments

You’re no doubt familiar with using functions in PHP. The language contains hundreds of built-in functions that you can use for all sorts of handy jobs — from manipulating text through to reading files, sending email messages and processing images.

You’re not limited to using just the predefined functions, though — you can create your own functions too! In this tutorial, I’ll show you how. You’ll learn:

Why it’s good to create your own functions
How to create and use a function
How to make your functions flexible by using parameters
All about optional parameters and default values, and
How to return values from your functions.

Ready? Let’s get started!

functions

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