Learning process -- when should one give up?

Francoise

Hello, kind people of PHPBuilder,

Can you please tell me what your early experiences in learning PHP were like?

I only began really trying to use PHP a few weeks ago. (Before that, however, I had been "studying" it on and off for a number of months but just in an academic kind of way -- learning vocabulary, reviewing functions, validation, etc.)

In general, I feel that my experience so far has been one set of frustrations after another. Every time I need to move on to the next step, in building my application, my heart sinks because I know I'm facing hours and hours of obstacles and frustration.

Example: yesterday morning I began work on a data-retrieval page. I worked on it all day. Literally. I worked on it during the entire evening. I worked on it until 2:00 in the morning. Yes, I made progress. Things that were originally unclear actually did start to clear up. Not enough, though -- I went to bed in ultimate defeat.

Now it's another day. I've already put in a couple of hours, but I'm not really any closer to success. More errors; more defeat. I could probably spend the entire day today, again. And it probably won't help - I'll go to bed tonight just as defeated as I was last night. 🙁

What was your experience like when you were learning? does any of this sound familiar?

I'm lots, lots older than most people at this forum, and sometimes I wonder if I should just give this effort up. I'd love to be able to do simple PHP programming, and I have made some progress.

I spend my days in frustration, however, and I feel defeated almost all the time. My question: is that a common experience? is there any way that I can make the learning process more pleasant? or, at least, less unpleasant? :o

Francoise

Okay, I'll take a stab at answering my own post. 😃

First, after posting, in a moment of deep discouragement, I started looking around the Web to see if anyone else has posted on this 'topic.'

I found this tip, which strikes me as really great: "Break down any programming challenge to its smallest piece. Then keep adding the pieces together to create your software."

All by itself, that one piece of advice would probably make a big difference to me. I haven't been following it, and that's probably caused me a lot of my grief.

Second, as I re-read my own post, I see that I've probably been working for too long at each sitting. It would be better to set a limit for any given session - maybe two hours? then get up and leave my desk for a while, maybe even force myself to go out.

Third, I'm probably not giving myself credit for the progress that I have made. In just a few weeks, I've gotten quite comfortable with several things that used to cause me a lot of anxiety (FileZilla, cPanel, my text editor). I've built a simple database. I've been able to connect to the database from my website. I've been able to register users. I've managed to add other types of data to the database, using PHP.

And yet . . . it's also been very discouraging. Isn't there some way in which I can cut down on the discouragement? some means of improving my victory-to-defeat ratio?? Surely there is some way to learn this stuff that is more pleasant than my path has been!

NogDog

One suggestion would be to try to modularize your project more, so that you can work on small, discrete parts of the application at any one time. Maybe work on a function or include file that does nothing but execute your database query and populate an array with the results. (A separate function/include file would handle the database connection.) Then another function or file would deal with taking that array and outputting it in the desired HTML. Make little test scripts you can use to test each module separately, so that you can focus on testing/fixing just that piece without getting buried in hundreds (or thousands) of lines of ancillary code doing other tasks. Then as you have two or more pretty solid modules, you can start merging them together into either the main script, or possibly intermediate level modules, depending on the scope of what you're working on.

This means more high-level design work up front, but that is often more than offset by faster development downstream. Also, by working on a small piece at any given time, you can get positive feedback sooner, because you can successfully complete writing a modest sized function or include file in a smaller time frame; plus if you need to change something as your requirements change, you hopefully just have to edit one file or function of a few dozen lines instead of wading through hundreds of lines of code in an all-in-one script.

If you get into object-oriented PHP, this is one of the main goals: defining various classes that narrowly focus on one comparatively small aspect of the program, and more or less independent of all the other classes. Then you start merging the resulting objects however you need in order to accomplish the larger tasks.

dagon

All i can suggest is start small, very small. What ever you build for the first year will be rubbish, but don't worry about it.

Working with some one elses code is also helpful install a cms, and play with making modules for it (most of them have this idea build in), as you build your modules you will learn more about the cms\php\etc and a whole lot of things, you will achieve something without having to create anything large. That will hopeful teach you good habits, its very easy to learn bad habits if you start with a blank page and no guidance.