My php 20 Hour Goal

[whales_88]

Sup!

 

Based on a video I watched recently called "Learn anything in 20 hours" or something like that (

) I've decided to take on something I've always

wanted to learn but been intimidated by, and that's programming.

 

I don't know a lick of anything except some HTML snippets, no prior programming experience at all whatsoever.

 

My goal is really to put forward 1-2 hours a day, for the next few weeks and learn PHP.  I want to create a browser based program that gets data from costco.com (or whatever) and runs that data through a set of functions, to calculate a set of numbers.  It'll then print out that data in some human-pleasing format in the browser.

 

Sounds simple, but I'm going to have to learn how to request a page from another website, look into the code, get a variable, pass the variable back to my server/script, once I have all the data's, run them through my equation, then print it out. 

 

Anyways, that's me and what I came here to do.  Wish me luck!

 

Godspeed,

Whales88

[ignace]

Learning by doing is the best way to learn to program. However, you should be realistic in your goals. Scraping a website touches on some of the hardest concepts to grasp for new programmers: Array's and Regex.

 

My advice to you, is to start small.

 

- Read the contents of a file and display them in HTML.

- Create a form with 2 input fields and add the numbers when the form is submitted.

- Create a form with only 1 input field and let the user guess the random number you set in the session and count his attempts.

- Create a database table using phpmyadmin, and fill it through PHP, list the records and allow to edit, delete them. For extra points:

-- auto-generate the table from SHOW COLUMNS <table>

-- and allow to select multiple records using a checkbox and delete them.