PHP upgrade

They have: 26 posts

Joined: Aug 2003

i'm currently learining php, i know all teh basics, and i was wondering, is their anything to do to get experiance on php and upgrade to a more advanced skill level. thanks

Suzanne's picture

She has: 5,507 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

Keep on doing it. The more real life examples you run into, the better. Try building something for yourself.

They have: 93 posts

Joined: Jun 2003

Suzanne always has good advise.

I only learned PHP last summer about a month earlier. I have already made my own CMS that my staff use on the gaming site.

Granted I have 2 certificates in programming and an associates degree in Computer Information System. All that helped me with was taking my skills level and knowledge directly into PHP, so I didnt have to learn what an array was, how to do if statements etc.

However a big part I didnt learn (because I went with Visual Basic as my language of choice) was Object Oriented Programming. I know the concept of it (almost like a function file, but a little more complex and invovled) and I used OOP in VB. However by the time I finished my associated and all the other courses I forget what I learned and was not exposed it dialy like I would have been from C++.

Anyway back to your question, you need to just challenge yourself ever day. Even if you have to re-invent the wheel (figuatively speaking). Repeating what others have already done on your own helps you learn. You might want to do this. Pick a basic scipt, say maybe taking a form and mailing its submission to your address.

Find a script that does it and try to do it, or to make it easier, join a chat room like irc.freenode.com #php and ask what functions are needed or search php.net (only function that is needed is mail() and how to use the $_POST or $_GET global arrays).

Just keep doing little things, and try adding on. My CMS came about when I needed a news script, and I wanted to use a database, so I learned SQL using the MySQL software(this helped me greately with some Oracle courses I took). From the news script I found I wanted to add staff, so I look into that, the database design, how to encrypt the username password. Then they wanted to add writings, then reviews, then games, then cheats, then they wanted categories. It just grew from a learning experience to full fledged CMS.

Now my challenge it to take it into the real of OOP from spagetti code.

That is all you need to do to learn. You might also want to find some projects that interest you. People like myself with projects they are turning products, or others in the GPL community often allow people to join their projects and groups so they can learn. Trade off is, you learn and do work for them. But in the end that is all most of life is working on things to learn.

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Mark Hensler's picture

He has: 4,048 posts

Joined: Aug 2000

I'd say a percentage of what I know about PHP I learned while researching to answer questions asked here. I've found Q&A to be a great stimulus for learning.

If you get stuck, having somewhere to ask questions can be a life-saver. But don't be afraid to get dirty with the code. Learning is a process which involves many trial and errors. I have a testing center which I use whenever I need to workout a section of code.

ShaneS, I've also got an AS in CIS (Systems Programming Emphasis). But my courses didn't get too deep in any one language. I was actually forced to take several different languages, and not overly deep in any of them. Plus logic classes (I never knew there were classifications of conditional statements).

Mark Hensler
If there is no answer on Google, then there is no question.

They have: 26 posts

Joined: Aug 2003

Thanks everybody that sure helped

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