New in programing, new in PHP

[Brko91]

Hello everyone,

 

I am 23 years old, and I live in Bosnia and Hercegovina. I finished law school, and I m currently voluentiring in the court.

I got interested in programming long ago, however did nothing about it until a month ago. I would like to be able to earn some money trough programing within a year or two. First tried C#, but later on decided to start with PHP. I will be visiting forum for advice and tutoring.

 

Quick question. Should I have started with PHP or HTML, CSS for instance?

[mogosselin]

Hi there! 

 

That's great that you're interested in programming! 

 

Since you're thinking about PHP, I guess that you would like to program websites right?

 

Do you want to program back-end administrations or "good looking" websites for "everybody"? What kind of web apps are you thinking about?

And how do you think you'll earn money with programming? By yourself as a freelancer? In a big company? Fixing Wordpress sites or building websites from zero?

 

I'm asking because depending on your answers, I'll give you different advice. 

 

For example, if you would like to build websites available for everybody with a great design, you'll probably want to look into CSS and HTML. But keep in mind that designing websites AND programming websites are 2 completely separate things and I rarely saw just one person able to do both of those tasks.  

 

Since you're saying that you're interested in programming, I would guess that designing websites is not your main priority. However, if you want to work with websites, you'll need to know how to fix a broken CSS or HTML display... So, yes, you should probably learn a bit of CSS and HTML, but you don't necessarily need to dive too much into it...

 

Except if you want to become a front-end developer that "programs" mainly in CSS, HTML and JavaScript. Those "developers" are often the one who takes the designs (made with Photoshop) and turn them into a "basic" website, but they won't do server side programming (like in PHP, C#, etc.) or play with CMS like Drupal, etc.. It's not impossible to do both (front-end and back-end development), but as time pass, it's becoming more and more difficult to follow the evolution and be good at both front-end and back-end development.

 

IMO, the first thing a newbie at web development should know is how the HTTP protocol works. It seems super technical with the "protocol" word here, but it's really easy. Here's a great tutorial about it:

http://www.jmarshall.com/easy/http/

 

Now, if you don't know HTML and CSS, I would recommend that you learn a little bit of it but if you're going to fix already existing design, you can learn along the way too. Just learn the basics of HTML and CSS (and maybe a bit of JavaScript), then go with PHP (a good place to start: phptherightway.com).

Then, learn something like MySQL or MongoDB.

 

One trap you should not fall into is to start a big project, for example: I'm going to make a social network. Not a good idea.

Start small! First : make a page where you can enter a text and it will output the number of words.

Then, make a page where you can store your text in a database and retreive it.

Then, make a small tip calculation app.

then ... you see the picture

 

It's probably more than you asked but anyway, don't hesitate to ask your questions

Edited February 24, 2014 by mogosselin