Re: Guidance

Matty Sarro wrote:

I understand and agree completely, and I really appreciate the help. My goal isn't so much to keep from re-writing code, but to have a pretty firm foundation to stand on before I really begin. I mean, with c++ or c, all I needed was the language, and that was pretty much it. I could do everything from there. This seems a lot more like its a marriage of a ton of different technologies :) On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 3:32 PM, Daniel Brown <parasane@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 3:01 PM, Stut <stuttle@gmail.com> wrote:

Maybe it's just me but I usually end up rewriting everything I write at least twice. That's just a fact of life and I've found that I end up with far better code that way than I do by trying to get it right first time. It also tends to be quicker.

[snip!]

In short, learn by doing. It's served me well.

I made it even shorter, Stut. ;-P He's exactly right, Matty. It's a form of evolution called "versioning". No programmer gets everything perfect the first (or usually even second, third, eighth) time. Good, usable, lasting code will be written and rewritten very often. Look at almost any code that's been around and distributed (including the PHP project itself) and you'll notice that there are dozens of versions, because over the years new ideas have come about to make it more productive, more economical, and all-around better. -- </Dan> Daniel P. Brown Senior Unix Geek <? while(1) { $me = $mind--; sleep(86400); } ?>

Indeed it is Matty, here's the way I would approach > 1 (X)HTML view source and w3schools are your friends here 2 CSS just the basic will get you started, worth reading W3C CSS spec particularly the BOX Model [http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-box/] 3 Make a project website in plain XHTML with CSS 4 ECMAScript (javascript) Make your static website do a couple of nice things with some javascript. you can't expect to program anything we related if you can't format the output! ============= 1 PHP read the manual at php.net - it is the bible and great and great and good and your best friend; go through all pages and literally copy and paste the demo code to see what it does, break it and fix it. 2 Make a PHP script that works and does something with some data from a file/url 3 save the data to a database, then get it back out [manually] then do it with PHP 4 by the time you're here your some time down the line and really don't need to be told 4 :) 'sup to you whether you learn the back end, or the front end first - remember you can easily just print/echo out text and it'll still show in the browser!