Building frameworks is about understanding design patterns and how they are applied together to solve common problems. There are many different ways to design a framework. By understanding and applying some common design patterns, you will be better prepared to make your own decisions whether you are building your own or evaluating an existing solution. –by Ron Dobley

Flight is a very lean micro-framework for PHP 5.3 and newer. Built for speed and simplicity, Flight is lightweight, yet has the basic elements needed for development of APIs and other similar applications. Flight is also extensible for those users who want to pack it with more features and power. This article is an in-depth look at Flight with some basic tutorials for getting projects up and running with ease. –by Andrew Podner

As developers, we are constantly faced with new things to learn. New versions of languages, new tooling, new best practices, and so on. How do you cope with it all? In this article, I’ll get a bit “meta” and talk about learning how to learn. We like our code to be efficient, so why shouldn’t our learning be efficient as well? –by Joel Clermont

Avoiding system dependencies is a key aspect of life when developing PHP projects that live in a shared hosting environment. The key is to avoid any extras that a standard host would be reluctant to support or that is even outside of the default configuration. It’s a hard lesson learned many times over by young PHP developers prior to being scooped up by an enterprise team, exposing them to the joys and peril of legacy code. –by Jacques Woodcock

Welcome to another edition of Education Station. In this (and next) month’s editions, I want to give you an introduction to a gem of a library; one that makes building versatile HTTP clients a veritable breeze. –by Matthew Setter

I’d like to continue on the thread from my article last month about making sure that we, as a community, don’t discourage new programmers. Last month, I discussed discouraging newcomers by trying to state that they had to ‘learn everything at once’. This month, I’d like to address another issue. –by Eli White

The title alone may get me some hate mail, but anyone who has discussed frameworks with me knows that I’m not shy about saying that I really don’t have a use for them. –by Beth Tucker Long