I've had an idea percolating about using the Meetups and Twitter to do some social, community learning to improve our knowledge. Let me give some background first...

When I want to get good at a new technology, even if it's a big topic, I've found that a good trick is to go to the site's documentation and just make it a point to read a page a day.

If you're Jewish, you'll be familiar with the concept of Daf Yomi. As huge as the Talmud is, if you participate daily in the Daf Yomi, you will have read the entire text in 7.5 years, after which you can have a really big party...before starting again ;)

Having done a function a day for a month or so, I made some great discoveries in PHP. Like the Levenshtein Distance. And the Soundex function.

But inevitably, I got busy for a couple days, and lost the track, stopped doing it. So I thought as a motivational tool, if we use the power of groups to do this together, we'll keep it up. If we all talk about the same PHP function every day, even if we get busy individually, as a group we'll make sure to get everyone back on track soon enough.

We can make a twitter list of people participating..."tweet" about the function that day, blog about it if it's a big topic...we'll all learn a lot.

We'll need some conventions. Particularly around tagging. We need a hashtag... Some thoughts: #PHPDafYomi ;) ... Or #FAD (function a day) or #PFAD (PHP Function a day)...

You might laugh at the #PHPDafYomi hash, but it's a good conversation starter that will inevitably get someone to ask and learn about PaaMayim Nekudotayim.

If we can get a few people to participate, what I'd suggest is we begin with the first link here:

http://us.php.net/man...

which leads to the first non table of contents page:

http://us.php.net/man...

then each page links to the next...so we don't need one person to decide what the next page we're discussing is. Just click the next link...

The only tricky part is that many pages in the manual contain almost no information...e.g.:

http://us.php.net/man...

so we'll have to deal with these things from time to time...and communally decide to skip a page...

Also, it might be worth allowing for discussion of these functions, since a "tweet" is only good for a link and quick comment....

Perhaps we can start a thread in the forum here each day to discuss the function...or maybe we'll put it at the LAPhp.org site...?

What do you guys think?

That's a great idea! Love it :)

Oh, just seen this post -- missed it back in the day for some reason.

I really like the idea, we might even try to do some weekly or monthly live or virtual sessions going through some parts of PHP.

Oleg.

That's a great idea, I'm down ;)