Post 9: Our Skills, PDO (PHP Data Objects), and AJAX with ASP.NET

Talking about the soft skills and the hard skills in career connections class was quick but intensive. As we know the hard skills are the industrial abilities, such as the object oriented programming or responsive design for the web development field, the soft skills are the interpersonal skills. These two types of skills are essential contents for any resume. Today, as there are so many web designers and developers that might share the same hard skills knowledge in applying for a job the main differentiation among them will be the soft skills. Identify our soft skills is as important as hard skills and even more especially for the job interviews.

It was a great movement in PHP Class when we used PDO (PHP Data Objects) to connect our application with the database as I used to use MySQL function to connect to the database but this method became absolute. PDO, as the name indicates is built in using Objects, as I mentioned in my previous post that using OOP became something crucial for any professional programmer or developer. But the main advantage of using PDO instead of MySQL function is that the first works with any type of database through using the same PHP code that supports most popular databases because it defines a consistent interface for accessing any database like MS SQL Server, Oracle, and for sure MySQL, while the second deals with only MySQL database.

With the ASP.NET class, we are still diving into using AJAX framework. Again, Microsoft provides a rich and asserting toolkit with its AJAX control that makes the development cycle much easier for .NET developers. In the class, we learned about the Animation extender control. This control enables us to target one or more elements in a page and play an animation.