Every good programmer might dreams to create a nice, big and famous project (software, web site, etc.). At least you need to dream to improve your skills, motivate yourself and move forward. However, if you want to create something really big, scalable and flexible you have to use some common existing practices and solutions that all strong developers use in daily basis. One of those common existing solutions is use of design patterns. If you are a beginner and want to get an idea what are design patterns and how to use them, this post is for you and I hope it will he helpful.

Just a little bit of humour from programmer's life. :-)

If you have a problem and you have to solve it using regular expressions, then you have two problems! :-)

Hello Coders!

In this article I will list a few advises on how to optimize your PHP web application performance. All these tips below I learned myself or from co-workers, blog articles and books. Keep in mind though that usually there is no need to go nuts when it comes to performance optimization. So, please don't open your IDE right away and don't try to use all tips together. Simply get an idea and note something that could be useful in your specific case.

For some programmers (especially for begginers) it might be a bit difficult to understand how do SQL joins work in real life. In fact, sometimes even experienced software developers are not able to explain what is the difference between JOIN, LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN.

Luckily, I found, perhaps, one of the best visual representations of SQL joins I have ever seen which will definately help to understand the mechanism of SQL joins.

See more graphical diagrams and explanations here

I have already posted a post with some SEO optimization tips. Let's continue this topic.

1. Try to put your keywords and key phrases closer to the beginning (top) of the page.

2. Use sitemap.xml to give search engines more information about the structure of your web site and pages.

3. Use mod_rewrite to build user-friendly URLs. www.yourdomain.com/cars/toyota/corolla looks better much than www.yourdomain.com/index.php?cat=cars&make=toyota&model=corolla.