In September we're hosting a night of generators and regex!
- How I learned to stop worrying and love Regular Expressions
Jordi Boggiano, Author of Composer, Monolog, php-console and frequent contributor to Symfony2, Twig and other OS projects
This session will cover Regular Expressions from the basics to the darkest corners of this arcane art.
Regular Expressions at the core come in handy to achieve validation and text manipulation tasks. In the day to day life of a developer, becoming comfortable with them opens up many more use cases.
As one of the tortured souls that actually enjoys writing - and reading - regexes, Jordi will share his passion so that you too can see there is no reason to worry.
- Generated Power: PHP 5.5 Generators
Mark Baker, Coordinator and Lead Developer of the PHPOffice library suite
One of the new features that was introduced in PHP 5.5: Generators provide an iterable alternative to arrays, or to classes that implement the Iterator interface. At the simplest level, they don't add anything new to PHP that you couldn't already do before, simply returning values or key/value pairs to a loop; though they do give you options to perform certain iterative functions without the memory overheads of an array, or without the complexities of lots of boilerplate code that an Iterator class requires.
But look more closely at Generators, and they can be used for much more complex purposes: from simulating arrays with duplicate keys, or keys that aren't simple integer or string values, to accepting new data each iteration rather than simply returning it, so that you can actually modify their behaviour dynamically, or build Cooperative subroutines, even to simulate parallel processing.
Generators add real power to PHP.
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JUST EAT have kindly offered to host the evening at their fantastic new office, as well as provide drinks and pizza. Don't forget to check them out – and if you're looking, they are hiring.
Afterwards we'll head to Small Bar!
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