Hello, I am lost and scared.

densin9

Hi Everyone,

I love to learn new things, and trying to design web pages is sort of like a hobby of mine. I feel confident with HTML, and CSS, however, I am trying to learn PHP to allow my pages to use MySQL to keep the content dynamic.

I am not some big programmer, or a large corporation. In fact, I didn't even take computers in school, but I have taught myself alot.

I have used PHP nuke, and have learned how to read/tweak it a bit, but the though of writing my own code seems like a obstacle impossible to overcome.

Any advice on how to progress? What should I try to do first, basically, can anyone give me some Homework that I can try, show you, and see if I can learn it?

If you can help, I would appreciate it.

Thanks

Densin

drew010

when i was first learning, a lot of what i did was write little 5-10 line scripts that demonstrated a function, as to learn how to use them, familiar with syntax, and discover the many functions available.

a tutorial i like is located at http://www.zend.com/php/beginners

it covers many things including how to use a mysql database.

the [man]date[/man] functions are fun to play with, and learning a lot of the [man]strings[/man] functions such as [man]substr[/man] [man]strstr[/man] [man]strpos[/man] [man]strlen[/man] and [man]str_replace[/man].

learning [man]arrays[/man] is good after you get familliar with it.

then try to come up with simple little things that you could find useful on your site, and try to make them. even if it seems sort of hard to do, you can browse the manual and build it up piece by piece.

also browsing code snippets at www.zend.com/codex.php

Rodney_H_

drew010 wrote:
a tutorial i like is located at http://www.zend.com/php/beginners

Those tutorials are informative and well written. If you decide to go through them, try and re-type them into your document when following (rather than copying and pasting the code). It will stick better if you have to manually type and you will concentrate more.

It is fun to learn PHP.

justsomeone

Yep. Just start off with "hello world". Then try using some of the string functions, maybe reversing it to "drlow olleh", then replacing the "o" with a "Z"... "drlZw Zlleh", and so on. When you see PHP responding to your whims like this, it should greatly help your confidence.

Then move on to the database functions.

Welcome aboard.