I have now come to the end of my learning programme and can now evaluate its success and the progress that I have made. To get the quantitative measurements out of the way, I have a complete PHP website that meets all of the requirements of the Creative Brief. I also retook the W3C Schools PHP Quiz, this time achieving a score 90% in a time of 4:21min. This shows a 60% improvement from my pre-test, and this time I did not take lucky guesses at answers. The questions that I got wrong were not really relevant to me and what I have covered. Obviously it would have been great to get 100% but realistically in the time frame that I had, it would be difficult to acquire the depth of knowledge across everything PHP needed to get 100%.
I can personally see the progress that I have made with PHP, mainly due to my confidence. Now If I was asked to produce another PHP site, there wouldn’t be the fear or trepidation apparent as before.
The learning resources that I used were probably overall not as useful as expected. Firstly the book was effective at taking me right from the beginning, up to having an understanding of what PHP is and what is involved in scripting it. However I found that doing the tutorial was not really working, as my specific project was always in the back of my mind and it was difficult to relate things covered in the tutorial to my project.
The W3C schools tutorials were generic and did not involve any scenarios, so it was easier to relate to my project. But still the problem I was having, was knowing actually what I needed for my site, with my needs being very specialised and specific.
I quickly realised that I needed to start looking on the internet for tutorials that could produce what I wanted or something similar. I found this to be the time when I progressed the most. Although the online tutorials proved to be most effective resource at helping me with my project, I do not believe that I would have been able to produce what I have without the other resources. They provided me with the background knowledge and a constant reference while I was building up the different features of the site.
Analysing my ability in relation to the industry, I probably have some way to go. If a job role required me to be able to contently code PHP efficiently and quickly, I would not be able to do that. On the other hand I understand some job roles to only require an understanding of PHP and be able to implement it. With a little bit more experience, having gained a better understanding of what PHP is needed to create specific features of a website, I believe I could meet this job requirement. The problem I think is that with PHP there are so many different ways to do everything, so it’s hard to know what’s the best ways to do specific things. This is something that only gaining more experience using PHP will bring.
Finally, taking into consideration the time that I have spent, I am proud of what I have achieved. Coming from a recent educational background where you are basically spoon-fed through the course, self learning was always going to be something I would find difficult. Not taking this into consideration, I would have been happy with my progress, so I am defiantly pleased with my progress.
