IRC - Practical PHP Programming

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One of the fastest way to get answers about PHP is to use one of the two popular PHP IRC channels. They both regularly have 200-300 people on there who program in PHP, of which between ten and twenty are chatting away about something. Peak activity times are evening in US EST (five hours behind GMT), and you will generally find the most talk at this time.

If you have an IRC client installed, connect to Efnet or FreeNode and go to channel #php. Note that both channels have very strict rules: do not ask to ask (that is, do not say "can I ask a question about XYZ" - just ask), do not post more than two lines of code into the channel at one time, do not start evangelistic fights over Perl/Java/etc, and so on. Be sure to check the channel rules as you enter or you may find yourself kicked out for breaking them.

A word of warning: take advice from this channel with a pinch of salt if the person giving it is not a channel operator. Many people come and go, and they aren't necessarily experienced enough to give authoritative answers. Also, please note that it's incredibly easy to get into rather pointless arguments on IRC - I've wasted many hours because of timewasters there who really haven't the first clue what they are talking about but are willing to argue a point to death anyway.

Furthermore, be prepared to show people your code when on IRC. A popular site here is www.pastebin.com, which lets you paste your PHP code online and pass the URL out to other people on IRC so that they can look at it and discuss potential fixes with you directly.

mikem - 30 Aug 2008

I am a newbie at PHP. I am trying to pass data from a form to PHP. I get:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/eseed/public_html/insert.php on line 8

from this:
<?
$username="eseed_eseed";
$password="num8010son";
$database="eseed_ministries";
$Church=$_POST['Church'];
$Phone=$_POST['Phone'];
$Fax=$_POST['Fax'];
$Contact First=$_POST['Contact First'];
$Contact Last=$_POST['Contact Last'];
$Head Pastor=$_POST['Head Pastor'];
$email=$_POST['email'];
$Web=$_POST['Web'];
$add1=$_POST['add1'];
$add2=$_POST['add2'];
$City, ST=$_POST['City, ST'];
$Zip=$_POST['Zip'];
$Last Contact Date=$_POST['Last Contact Date'];
$Num Contacts=$_POST['Num Contacts'];
$Comments=$_POST['Comments'];
mysql_connect(localhost,$username,$password);
@mysql_select_db($database) or die( "Unable to select database")
$query = "INSERT INTO contacts VALUES ('','Church','Phone','Fax','Contact First','Contact Last','Head Pastor','email','add1','add2','City, ST','Zip','Last Contact Date','Num Contacts','','Comments')";
mysql_query($query);

mysql_close();
?>

19.13.4 IRC

This is NOT the latest copy of this book; click here for the latest version.