Wordpress,php and learning to code in general

Hello!

Since around mid Jan,I've been teaching myself through various online tutorials how to code WP themes.

Is this a good way to start learning php?
Eventually i want to learn to code my own app,and I can now kinda see how php works in with xhtml and css.

Have i learnt this backwards? Do i need to start at w3schools and learn it from scratch or what?

What are my options in moving forward with my learning

Thanks!

 

I recommend you begin with a small tutorial to learn the basics of PHP coding. There are plenty of good to excellent tutorials available free of charge via the web. Tackling a system like WordPress at the outset is not the best way the learn the fundamentals of PHP, CSS, and XHTML.

You might find Workbench especially useful as an all-in-one development environment as you learn about PHP, CSS, and XHTML.

 

I found the following book extremely helpful when I needed to learn PHP for a project I did at RIT: Teach Yourself PHP in 10 Minutes. It is relatively inexpensive so price should not be an issue.

 

The best way to learn how to code is to jump right in like you are doing, with something that needs to get done. I started my first company in 1992 selling a point of sale software program that I wrote. However, I sold the first 6 copies prior to having written it. Actually, prior to even knowing how to code (I just figured I could). I then spent the next 6 weeks literally locked in my apartment with a PC, the Visual Basic instruction manual (this was before the internet and all the information we have today), and a lot of tears and frustration.

I went on to sell 46 copies at $995 each that same year.

 

This brings back some memories...back around the same time I teamed up with a hospital who was marketing a worker's compensation program using a language that needed a runtime - and the hospital WASN'T paying for the runtime.

I was just learning Clipper around then and made a mockup with a fully working menu and 2 working screens (and no error handling, etc). I convinced them that the money they'd save on not paying runtime licenses would more than make up for the money they'd pay me for the second version.

Well, they bought into the concept....AND wanted customer-ready code in 30 days. I was able to deliver, including a data migration utility from v1 to v2. Good times, but tough times. The best part was I wanted to normalize their data structures as part of the development process but they said no. A very large customer later paid me for customer development to do exactly that, which ended up being almost as much as the original contract.

If you need to learn how to swim and have confidence in your own abilities then jumping in the water is a viable strategy...

 

Ahhh, Clipper.... I made a lot of money withClipper.. good old Summer87 release, and then Clipper 5.2, which lasted forever. I actually wrote a system to keep track of wellfare cases for a municipality in NJ around 1992/3 in Clipper, and then converted them to FoxPro 3 for Windows a couple years later. I later in the mid and late 90's made money converting people from Clipper into Foxpro or Dbase, the popular XBase languages of the time..

Kids these days have it too easy...

 

Learning HTML is a really good way to start, its good foundation to have.

 

It never ceases to amaze me how people (including some fairly experienced programmers) don't see the value in data normalization, or think it will be "more efficient" to avoid normalization.

I would never consider myself a programmer, but I did write some code that got sold as commercial applications back in the late 70s, and I remember the early coursework I took spent a tremendous amount of time on basic data structure, optimization techniques (memory and processor time was EXPENSIVE), database normalization, and other foundational theory.

When I talk to a lot of programmers in their 20s, I get the distinct impression that many computer science programs are not spending nearly as much time on basic theory and foundations of programming. Perhaps these kids just slept through those classes (or perhaps I'm showing my age) but it seems like there's a lot more code bloat and sloppiness than there was years ago.

As far as learning PHP, in addition to the resources mentioned, I would suggest Lynda.com as a great source for some basic introductions to PHP, Ajax, XML, and a couple other languages (mostly web-based)... You won't get a ton of theory and background, but for what they have, their courses are generally taught by really good instructors, and you can get an "all-you-can-eat" plan for $25 a month to watch their videos.

btw, as for programming, I ran across this, which I think has a lot of truth in it:

http://devthought.com/blog/general/2009/02/the-four-stages-of-programming-competence/

 

I don't see the value in data normalization and think it is more efficient to avoid it in almost any transactional system.

I've been programming since I was 8 years old.

 

Not to go off topic but...

We were considering a programmer who we liked, but was self-taught. During discussions about the data structure, he proposed "breaking" normalization to (essentially) make his job simpler, and so I decided to see if perhaps my understanding of the importance of normalization was outdated (having studied database design almost 30 years ago).

I contacted several friends who are pretty "high end" programmers and also posted on a couple discussion boards where some pretty well regarded coders post and asked the question. The response was pretty much unanimous; I was told this is something you NEVER do unless there's a really, really good reason (of which there apparently are some), and that a programmer who didn't understand the importance of normalization was probably not someone we should be working with.

I can see where, in theory, it shouldn't raise any issues at all, and why it would make the application faster and cleaner, but I can also see why there might be a greater risk of loss of data integrity.

As I said, I'm not a programmer and so don't hold myself qualified to judge, but I always find it interesting to discuss things like this, because I think it's very possible that it's just a philosophical difference that doesn't mean a whole lot in the real world.

 

I don’t have the energy to discuss this now, I’m traveling and am tired. I’ll post more on it, but will say this:

My experience is that many people in the industry today do not understand a great deal about the technology.

I’ve been on every side of this, and have spent Millions of other people’s money getting a lot wrong and listing to a lot of what turned out to be theorists and idealists, remembering either what they have read or how they think it should be in a perfect world.

There are two kinds of programmers, those that “get’er done” and those that like to discuss how hard programming is and the fact that they do not get good specs from others.

In IT, the trend is to only own a part of the technology, platform, or answer, and then argue for the theoretical perfection of your part (even in your examples we have the idea of a DBA evaluating a programmer because the programmer has a different view, one that may not argue for the perfection of the DBAs part).

This is a deep, nuanced, difficult discussion with little facts and many people quick to proclaim their view not only correct, but denounce those that disagree with it as hacks.

In the conversations, always remember to listen to arguments that focus on the perfection of the parts rather than the whole, that is usually the best way to get to the bottom of it.

 

I am genuinely interested in this sort of thing and agree with your approach, so if/when you have the time or energy I'd love to see more information on it. (perhaps we should start a new topic in off-topic!)

Thanks!