Modesto Scripting Languages Meetup is still going strong (yea! 17 members!) Our most recent meetup was a PHP-newbie night and I got to dig through the material over on metapundit.net/ for my rants PHP. I refer to the 5 years I spent mostly writing PHP and Javascript as 'the dark period' :)

Anyways my contribution was a talk on the Top 10 Rookie Mistakes in PHP. The link goes to my slides - hit the spacebar to advance. And if you're in Modesto or the Central Valley come check us out. I think we're going to do a couple Javascript sessions next...