Question for Beginners

[StedeTroisi]

I started a free, unique PHP tutorial, which you can find in my signature below. My question is for newbies. With so many great resources on learning PHP, would yet another PHP course be useful? Also, what is your biggest problem with beginning tutorials online?

 

Thanks for your help,

 

- Stede

[xcoderx]

one cannot learn till some experienced instructor explains things better. nowonder you will learn alot in online courses but if u join some institution you will learn more not limited like the online courses. according to me thou. dunno what others have to say about it.

[JonnoTheDev]

I started a free, unique PHP tutorial, which you can find in my signature below. My question is for newbies. With so many great resources on learning PHP, would yet another PHP course be useful? Also, what is your biggest problem with beginning tutorials online?

Stick to recommended tutorials. Some tutorials contain bad code and get you into picking up bad habbits. I always recommend learning from a book prior to doing any online learning. A Book will stick to a style of coding, tutorials will differ in styles and methods of tackling problems with each.

[JasonLewis]

Honestly, I'm struggling to remember how I learned PHP. Fairly sure it was just by looking at other PHP scripts, then occasionally a tutorial. A friend showed me a bit over MSN and yeah, just picked it up. Picked up a few bad habits as well, but you know.. I make do with the knowledge I have, be it small or vast.

[StedeTroisi]

Honestly, I'm struggling to remember how I learned PHP. Fairly sure it was just by looking at other PHP scripts, then occasionally a tutorial. A friend showed me a bit over MSN and yeah, just picked it up. Picked up a few bad habits as well, but you know.. I make do with the knowledge I have, be it small or vast.

 

Nothing wrong with that approach. Everyone has different ways of learning. I don't think one size fits all. I must disagree about traditional college though. I find programmers who learned on their own have a much deeper knowledge than kids that just graduated.

 

Just my opinion though.

 

- Stede

 

[Tazerenix]

i personally learned by using tutorials and reading others code/writing code. Now i learn more and more by studying the techniques used by others. Learning a programming language is different for each person.

[ignace]

Honestly, I'm struggling to remember how I learned PHP. Fairly sure it was just by looking at other PHP scripts, then occasionally a tutorial. A friend showed me a bit over MSN and yeah, just picked it up. Picked up a few bad habits as well, but you know.. I make do with the knowledge I have, be it small or vast.

 

Nothing wrong with that approach. Everyone has different ways of learning. I don't think one size fits all. I must disagree about traditional college though. I find programmers who learned on their own have a much deeper knowledge than kids that just graduated.

 

Just my opinion though.

 

- Stede

 

 

College's skims over industry technologies so you have a basic working knowledge of how it operates, it knows that it can't teach you the expertise you gain through industry work. That said though, I never understood as why they never explained their decisions:

 

When I got DB design they told me to ALWAYS use an ID, they never told me that ID was a surrogate key or what a natural key was and why I should not use it? We didn't ask as we didn't knew what to ask for? They also went over the different normal forms as defined by Codd in a single lesson, to be applied nowhere... Everyone's DB design was always fine, a few books later taught me that those DB designs were not fine and actually never even reached NF3 and contained UPDATE-anomalies.

 

Or when you approached them with a more advanced topic (OOA&D) they told you to wait a few more semesters as it's covert somewhere in the course, and when they do decide to give you some introduction you can poke holes in their explanation. Or why allow anyone who has a very limited working knowledge on a certain subject, teach this subject? All kinds of question marks popped up above my head when the teacher wrote position: right; and when I pointed out the typo, I was told that what was on the projected image was correct?? I had to involve W3C to prove my point. On the final exam we were told that we could not edit any of the given code, that is all fine by me if it weren't that it contained some typo's.

 

I think it would be better if teachers communicated their decisions more. PHP was taught using the global keyword as a standard... I scratch my head and wonder why?

 

All rant, don't bother reading.. posted it because I didn't wanted to delete it all because it had IMO some good points.

[StedeTroisi]

Honestly, I'm struggling to remember how I learned PHP. Fairly sure it was just by looking at other PHP scripts, then occasionally a tutorial. A friend showed me a bit over MSN and yeah, just picked it up. Picked up a few bad habits as well, but you know.. I make do with the knowledge I have, be it small or vast.

 

Nothing wrong with that approach. Everyone has different ways of learning. I don't think one size fits all. I must disagree about traditional college though. I find programmers who learned on their own have a much deeper knowledge than kids that just graduated.

 

Just my opinion though.

 

- Stede

 

 

College's skims over industry technologies so you have a basic working knowledge of how it operates, it knows that it can't teach you the expertise you gain through industry work. That said though, I never understood as why they never explained their decisions:

 

When I got DB design they told me to ALWAYS use an ID, they never told me that ID was a surrogate key or what a natural key was and why I should not use it? We didn't ask as we didn't knew what to ask for? They also went over the different normal forms as defined by Codd in a single lesson, to be applied nowhere... Everyone's DB design was always fine, a few books later taught me that those DB designs were not fine and actually never even reached NF3 and contained UPDATE-anomalies.

 

Or when you approached them with a more advanced topic (OOA&D) they told you to wait a few more semesters as it's covert somewhere in the course, and when they do decide to give you some introduction you can poke holes in their explanation. Or why allow anyone who has a very limited working knowledge on a certain subject, teach this subject? All kinds of question marks popped up above my head when the teacher wrote position: right; and when I pointed out the typo, I was told that what was on the projected image was correct?? I had to involve W3C to prove my point. On the final exam we were told that we could not edit any of the given code, that is all fine by me if it weren't that it contained some typo's.

 

I think it would be better if teachers communicated their decisions more. PHP was taught using the global keyword as a standard... I scratch my head and wonder why?

 

All rant, don't bother reading.. posted it because I didn't wanted to delete it all because it had IMO some good points.

 

This was a great post. Thank you.

 

- Stede

 

[ignace]

To answer your actual question though:

 

would yet another PHP course be useful?

 

If this is in the form of tuxradar.com, killerphp or survive the deep-end then please go for it. Novices need these kind of resources to help them advance in the subject and there aren't that many great out there.

[StedeTroisi]

My guide is a little different. You can get to it from my signature and let me know what you think. Thanks again for your advice and the links.

 

- Stede

 

[ignace]

You use a Blog which is all fine, the reason I adviced resources like tuxradar is that they have a TOC and therefor can guide novices in to the more advanced topics. I also think your tutorials assume a certain knowledge on the visitor end on computers and computer programming, like the CLI is new to them and therefor confusing as they want to execute it in the browser (they wanna see their output in the browser -> their goal). They will assume you are talking about something else, also PHP related. At this point they may even think there are multiple PHP programming languages.

[StedeTroisi]

You use a Blog which is all fine, the reason I adviced resources like tuxradar is that they have a TOC and therefor can guide novices in to the more advanced topics. I also think your tutorials assume a certain knowledge on the visitor end on computers and computer programming, like the CLI is new to them and therefor confusing as they want to execute it in the browser (they wanna see their output in the browser -> their goal). They will assume you are talking about something else, also PHP related. At this point they may even think there are multiple PHP programming languages.

 

Thanks for looking at my site. I agree somewhat, and may have to have a different, or alternative tutorial. My gut tells me to go in this direction, and I thought I would give it a try. The resources you provide are awesome, and I love the TOC of Tuxradar. My site is just beginning, so I hope to offer much for newbies and experienced programmers alike.

 

- Stede

 

[V]

StedeTroisi,

 

Thanks for contributing php tutorials I'm a noob in the process of learning php. I started learning the basics then followed some "make a website from nil" video tutorials which helped but the creators tend to forget that the viewers have no idea what they're doing. I learned by mostly practicing, following how-to tutorials and asking the brilliant people on this forum.  I can't find any easy tutorials on how to make a navigation menu using php and MYSQL.

[StedeTroisi]

StedeTroisi,

 

Thanks for contributing php tutorials I'm a noob in the process of learning php. I started learning the basics then followed some "make a website from nil" video tutorials which helped but the creators tend to forget that the viewers have no idea what they're doing. I learned by mostly practicing, following how-to tutorials and asking the brilliant people on this forum.  I can't find any easy tutorials on how to make a navigation menu using php and MYSQL.

 

Thank you for the kind words. There are so many PHP tutorials out there that just thinking about it makes my head spin. Most don't teach things from the very beginning though. They try to teach everything at once, and I want to make a difference in that area.

 

I want to make programming fun again, like it was when I was growing up. You didn't have to learn 4 languages, 2 IDEs, and 50 APIs at the same time. You could get the basics down very quickly.

 

Soon I will start integrating PHP and MySQL, and even without HTML you will start to understand how to create menus.

 

Don't stop learning,

 

- Stede

 

[ignace]

Don't stop learning,

 

Best advice ever!