Course Help

[Skitzo]

Hi All,

I'm a new teacher and my school has put me in Computer Science.  Many of you who have taken computer science courses in high school will express frustration with the teacher due to the fact that YOU know more than the teacher!!  :D  Anyhow, I don't want that to happen and I need your advice.

I don't know much about php and MySQL.  All I know is I want to teach it to my kids so they will be ready.  I like the fact that it's event oriented and it's accessible online.  I would like to use php and mysql  with phpmyadmin.

Can anyone help me with what they think a beginner student should learn?  I am thinking of an address book.  I just don't know how to get the php and mysql to shake hands.  Does anyone know of an online step by step course which is out there I could follow? 

Thank you!

[steelmanronald06]

My programming courses teached us the basis of programming, not so much as the language itself.  The task of a programming coarse, so my professor explained, is to teach students the bases of all programming languages so that they can pick up any language with ease according to what their employer assigns them as a job.  We learnt basic algorithms, object oriented, ACL, and similar things that are pretty much consistent in all programming languages.  Granted, I have taken a Visual Basic .Net course before, which focused on VB .NET, but it was a lot of theory and very little programming.  We just used VB as a guide and he pointed out how certain things in VB were similar to other aspects in different languages.

[Nameless12]

I think teaching how to do things like create the following functions wuold be good for beginners because it teaches
1. functions
2. loops
3. arrays
4. variables
5. that it is not magic

strlen() //length of a string
array_reverse() //reverse an array
strrev() //reverse a string
sizeof()  //count array
ucfirst() //first word capitalize
ucwords() //first letter of each word capitalize
strtolower() //make a string all lower case
strtoupper() //make a string all upper case

[jcombs_31]

One of the key things taught to me in college was understanding search algorithms and never using prebuilt functions that the language includes.  We ALWAYS had to write our own function for things such as string manipulation.  I did pretty much everything in java, but the idea is the same.  Learn to program by creating your own functions.

The first things you must obviously teach is a certain set of logic operators, strings, variables, loops, conditional statements, etc.  I think every programming course always starts with a hello world script and goes from there.