This week saw me start my learning using the Sitepoint book. I firstly read through the first dozen or so pages of the book. It was daunting to see that I didn’t even have much of an idea about the topics listed in the first few chapters. Knowing that I have to basically cover the whole book, I knew my learning was going to involve spending a lot of time with my new book!
My first task was to set up the testing local server. This again gave me no confidence that I was going to be successful with PHP. I am normally very good with configuring new software, however I had difficulties seeing the confirmation that the server was ready to use. After a few re-installs and too many laptop restarts to count, I got the server working. This was just an insight into how technical and complicated PHP is.
Continuing to work through the pages, I was starting to feel less alienated by the language and terms used. Straight away there was the opportunity to create my first PHP script. It was probably the most basic PHP possible and was just fetching the server time, however it was a mini achievement for me and was almost a confidence boost or maybe just relief that it worked.
The next chapter covered tables and MySQL. I had already covered databases going back to high school so this chapter wasn’t as hard to grasp as the previous one. I recognised many of the database terms and this took the ‘fear’ out of my learning. I went through creating tables and adding rows of data. I took this opportunity to visit PHP Admin on my hosting account. Seeing tables in this way helped be grasp creating them with code.
I finally went onto cover ‘variables’ which then went onto ‘arrays’. I found the concept hard to grasp at first, but once I got my head into gear I started to follow it. The PHP reminded me of algebra from Maths at school. It was always something I enjoyed and was successful at. Whether I am as successful with PHP, remains to be seen!
Targets for next two weeks;
- Cover next 5 chapters in the Sitepoint book.
- Visit W3C schools and make a start to the PHP tutorials.
- Start Designing The Fiction Section site.
