On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 10:04 PM, Nikita Popov nikita@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 11:04 AM, Terry Ellison ellison.te...@gmail.com
wrote:
On 10/06/13 19:33, Nikita Popov wrote:
We just published some rather extensive documentation on internal object
orientation:
http://www.phpinternalsbook.**com/classes_objects.html
http://www.phpinternalsbook.com/classes_objects.html
This is part of a larger project aimed at documenting the engine and
making
it accessible to new contributors.
This looks like an excellent beginning so thanks. A few general
comments:
1) I notice that your book is © Copyright 2013, Julien Pauli - Anthony
Ferrara - Nikita Popov. All Rights Reserved rather than GDFL or one of
the CC variants of open document licences. They only issue that I see
here
is that I -- and possibly others -- might be a bit guarded in providing
comment and input if that content was being transferred to the authors
unconditionally. Also if you are reserving all rights then you will need
to be careful to ensure that all the content is yours and not extracted
from an open or other 3rd party source. Surely this going to add to your
authoring burden?
This is just a legal precaution, because we are not yet exactly sure about
the publishing formats for this project. If we wanted to actually have a
(printed) book, then questions of ownership can become problematic. Anyway,
I'm pretty sure that we will publish this under a CC license eventually.
2) Wikipedia, for example, contains a lot of good in-depth explanation of
CompSci concepts and standard patterns such as
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Hash_table
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table.
You might consider the content cut: when you include basic discussion of
101 principles (e.g. on HashTables); and when you limit
your content to their PHP-specific implementation, with suitable
references to the 101 stuff. Tending to the former will make the book a
lot
longer, albeit standalone. Your call, but I would have thought that the
majority of the readership by nature will have some CompSci background
and
so want to skip the 101 stuff, or be referenced out to the appropriate
in-depth WP or other reference.
We don't have particularly much 101 stuff to cover (basically just
hashtables), in which case I think its better to include a small
introduction to the topic to make things self-contained. Also, this project
is targeted not just at developers with years of C experience, but also at
people coming from a more higher-level (PHP) background, in which case
intimate knowledge of things like hashtables probably can't be expected.
3) What is your preferred markup format for feedback and contributions?
E.g. do you maintain an ODF or Docbook XML under some accessible git
repository, or is is a case of (for example)
hashtables/basic_structure.html para at line 138. Not quite true that
the arBucket array will never shrink down: you can not reduce a PHP
array, you only can grow it. You can always implement your own
resizer by realloing the arBucket array and the calling
zend_hash_rehash() to do this. (This would be a good standard hash
API function by the way.
Heh, how did you get to that page? Wasn't supposed to be linked anywhere,
as that chapter isn't done yet. In any case, we are writing this in RST
(reStructured Text) in a private git repo (which will be made public
sometime down the road). So if you have feedback, no need to write text in
any particular format, just point us to what wrong / missing (or any other
suggestions) and we'll fix it.
Regarding your particular example: Agree that this wasn't right in that
formulation. The text now says while the arBuckets array automatically
grows, it will *not* shrink when you remove elements. I would rather not
mention the hack to implement the shrinking though, because its bad style
to directly mess with the members of the HT.
Yes that was my writings. As I'm not English :-) I may miss words or
sometimes turn sentences to a different meaning from what I initially
thought in my native language.
Nikita fixes that ;-)
Julien.Pauli
