Top 5 Daily Questions About PHP

Anyone know of a good PHP library that will allow me to pull cover art images from Amazon? I'm not much of a coder, but I'm working on a project right now that needs to pull DVD cover art from Amazon. Does anyone know of existing PHP scripts that can help me learn about doing so? I've got an amazon web associates key, but I'm not sure what to really do from there. Thanks - 30 minutes ago

CodeFilter: I am looking for online classes mainly in the area of web programming (PHP, MySQL, AJAX, etc.). I need to brush up on my self taught skills. I am looking for something on the level of an actual coures, with assignments, deadlines, etc. (I don't necessarily like those things, but find I learn much better that way than self-paced from a book). Free or paid service is fine - I am mainly concerned with quality. I sort of like the courses and organization offered by eclasses.org, but I have no idea if they are good and credible? Any recommendations would be very much appreciated - 18 hours ago

I'm planning to add a feature to my website that will allow users to request periodic updates by email. I've cobbled together a little PHP script that uses the mail() function. It works perfectly when I test it myself, but I have no idea how this will work when released to a signficant number of users. One problem - I don't know how many users I'll have, so I'm trying to keep my up-front costs to a minimum. Optimistically, I'll have a few hundred users. In my wildest dreams, I'd have a few thousand. Another problem - the email will be dynamically generated based on user-entered criteria - i.e., the user will log in, and enter some parameters. A php page will pull the appropriate data from the MySQL database, assemble the email, and send it out. Also, the emails will be sent on demand (not according to some predetermined schedule). So, I think that rules out something like Campaign Monitor's newsletter service. My site is hosted at Media Temple, on a Grid Server. Is this a disaster waiting to happen, or is that kind of demand/load trivial? If the former, is there a better way to handle this? A reliable third-party service? Many thanks in advance for any advice! Cheers, Matt Stuehler - 4 days ago

I'm a tech for a school district. One of my high schools was hit by lightning. The computer that my faculty uses to clock in every day (a windows 95 machine) died. I need a replacement ASAP. I don't know if weather had anything to do with the machine going down or not. I do know that the HD clicks grinds when powered up and it isn't being recognized in BIOS. I've built them a new PC and was ready to install the software for them, but no one knows what software they were running. I've contacted our helpdesk, software procurement, etc. The software is so old that no one remembers what it was. I seem to recall it was some sort of Microsoft Access DB called Logman. Googling hasn't provided any answers. I've decided to download some free software and hack it to my needs. I found phptimeclock and timetrex. Timetrex requires me to import users from the command line :-/, which is not something I can explain to our database specialist. PHPtimesheet is simple, but there are features I need which I don't have the time to code myself - i have other schools to get ready and the start of the year is approaching. I need it to be a simple login because my users are not tech-savvy. 1-click logins are great. I also need the ability to clock everyone out at one time. This is the important feature phptimeclock is missing. Any suggestions? PM me if you have a solution that you don't want to release to general pub. - 4 days ago

SQLFilter: I'm struggling with a specific SQL query. I have 2 tables, 'questions' and 'answers', which are linked by a field in answers. I would like to select the questions which have the most answers in the last 24 hours. I have wo tables: 'questions' with columns 'id' and other irrelevant fields 'answers' with columns 'id', 'ofquestion', 'date', and other irrelevant fields. The 'ofquestion' field is the ID of the question row that it is associated with. Each question can be answered multiple times, just as here on the green. I am trying to formulate an SQL query that will select the 5 questions with the most answers in the last 24 hours. This is the closest that I've been able to come, though it still doesn't work. SELECT * FROM questions WHERE exists ( SELECT answers.ofquestion, count(*) FROM answers WHERE answers.ofquestion = answers.ofquestion AND answers.id answers.id AND answers.date > SUBTIME( NOW( ) , '24:0:0.000000' ) AND answers.ofquestion = questions.id GROUP BY answers.ofquestion ORDER BY count(*) ) I'm no SQL expert, so this may not even be close. Anybody have any suggestions? I'm using PHP, so I have that set of tools in my disposal if need be. Thanks! - 6 days ago