We’ve all felt that haze that forms around your eyes when you’re trying to study lines and lines of code from a written tutorial. After an hour or so, you’re eyes simply become too weakened to continue reading. That’s why I’m such a huge fan of video tutorials. You can sit back and learn at your own pace. I’ve compiled a list of over thirty screencasts that are guaranteed to help you.

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In this week’s screencast, I’ll show you how to upload files and then have PHP dynamically create a thumbnail. Whether you’re building an ecommerce site, or just a simple gallery, these techniques will absolutely prove to be useful. If you’re ready for your “spoonfed” screencast of the week, let’s get going!

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This is a time-lapse video of what was originally about 2 hours. Though this video doesn’t teach anything specifically, it’s strangely calming to watch.

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With a wife and kids, Jonathan says, the work day must end precisely at 5:00. Yet somewhow, he still manages to be an accomplished web developer, writer, blogger, freelancer - you name it! One wonders if Jonathan uses a special clock that the rest of us aren’t privy to.

“An internationally-admired web designer and developer based in Ottawa, Canada, Jonathan Snook is a gifted creator of striking designs, impeccable markup and code, and forward-thinking ideas and applications that invariably win the respect of the top people in the industry.”

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Let’s imagine that you want to build a page that will display snapshots of your latest work. One way to do this would be to hard-code the images into your document. The obvious repercussion is that, every time you want to add a new item, you must manually update your html document. Another method would be to store and retrieve the information from a MYSQL database. This will function perfectly, though for many sites, this solution may possibly offer far more power than is technically needed - not to mention the increase in hosting costs.

In such instances, the best solution is to make PHP scan your “portfolio” folder and dynamically create the code for you. If you want to update your page with a new snapshot, all that you need to do is drag the image, and its respective thumbnail, into the appropriate folders - and PHP will do the rest. Let’s build it now!

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When I was fifteen, I was an awkward skinny kid whose voice switched octaves seemingly at random. I was the type of kid who turned bright red even when a girl would say hello. That was me; Now meet Harley Alexander. At only fifteen years old, Harley has accumulated an unprecedented amount of knowledge. While the rest of us, at that age, considered the day to be well spent if we got thirty minutes of actual work done, Harley has raised the bar to an extremely high mark. “How to Be a Rockstar WordPress Designer” co-author at 15? Is that crazy? How did he do it?

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