What’s the best browser? That’s a question I get asked all the time. For years now I’ve been pretty non-committal when it came to taking sides in the browser wars - after all, a browser is a browser and it’s what’s displayed in the browser window that matters, not the browser itself.

Apart from the darn good web browser that it is, Firefox is also a web designer’s best friend. You can do almost all of your web page testing within Firefox and use it as a tool along with your graphic and code editors to help you design better and faster.

Progress always comes at a cost. In the case of web browsers, users bear the cost when developers take the rendering of certain authoring tools and browsers (especially Internet Explorer) as gospel. When a new version of that browser comes along and fixes bugs or misinterpretations of the spec (or introduces new ones) or in any way changes behavior, sites break and our clients, bosses, and users get very unhappy.

All non-trivial websites need a database, so it pays to build database skills. This entry summarizes 15 years of experience in the important issue of how to assign primary keys to your tables.

Eclipse started as a Java IDE and evolved into a generic IDE with a strong Java bias. If you start out with a standard Eclipse installation and without any Eclipse experience, it may take you a while to figure out the best way to set it up for use with PHP. This article will make the PHP setup fast and easy.