lost

[Ninjakreborn]

I have been studying php from.
[a href=\"http://www.hudzilla.org/phpbook/index.php\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.hudzilla.org/phpbook/index.php[/a]
previously I studied php for 1 full week, but not any week, I was working exactly 16 hours per day monday through friday, totally 80 hours for the entire week of nothing but studying, then I go to this site, and learn more in half a night and 1 day which is today than I did in that entire book.
atleast when I was going through chapter 1 and 2 completely.
But now I have entered chapter 3.
as soon as I hit types of data I was confused, I went on like I was doing well through all the way to 3.11 or so when I got into operators, and looked back and realized I didn't know anything about what I had read, or didn't understand any of it, the first 2 chapters, I completely mastered. Like if statements, else, if else, while, for loops, utilizing infinite loops properly, wrote a few basic scripts excetera. And it comes down to this and I am totally lost, what do I do now, I don't understand any of this, or how to utilize each section into my own scripts and play with them like I did with the if statements and things to learn, I am totally lost here, any advice, or ideas.

[sdaniels]

[!--quoteo(post=365863:date=Apr 17 2006, 10:25 PM:name=businessman332211)--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(businessman332211 @ Apr 17 2006, 10:25 PM) [snapback]365863[/snapback][/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--]
I have been studying php from.
[a href=\"http://www.hudzilla.org/phpbook/index.php\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.hudzilla.org/phpbook/index.php[/a]
previously I studied php for 1 full week, but not any week, I was working exactly 16 hours per day monday through friday, totally 80 hours for the entire week of nothing but studying, then I go to this site, and learn more in half a night and 1 day which is today than I did in that entire book.
atleast when I was going through chapter 1 and 2 completely.
But now I have entered chapter 3.
as soon as I hit types of data I was confused, I went on like I was doing well through all the way to 3.11 or so when I got into operators, and looked back and realized I didn't know anything about what I had read, or didn't understand any of it, the first 2 chapters, I completely mastered. Like if statements, else, if else, while, for loops, utilizing infinite loops properly, wrote a few basic scripts excetera. And it comes down to this and I am totally lost, what do I do now, I don't understand any of this, or how to utilize each section into my own scripts and play with them like I did with the if statements and things to learn, I am totally lost here, any advice, or ideas.
[/quote]

[Ninjakreborn]

??

[sdaniels]

I'd say it sounds like you need to get yourself a better book. I have been reading some of your questions on this site recently and, yes they are all good questions, but I think that if you are learning to program you may not need all the information you are asking for. Try doing some of the tutoirials on this site, as you complete some of them, you will start to understand how it all works. A great book I can recomend to you is 'PHP and MySQL for dynamic web sites' by Larry Ullman. Dont let me discourage you from asking questions, I'm just trying to pont you in a better direction.

[kenrbnsn]

First, don't expect to "completely master" PHP in only a few weeks of studying, even if you're into cramming it in. I've been programming PHP since 1999 and I'm still learning how to do things differently.

Do you have access to somewhere where you can just "play" with scripts? If you have you own Windows machine, either desktop or laptop, you can download [a href=\"http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html\" target=\"_blank\"]xampp[/a] and get a full local environment consisting of Apache, PHP (4 or 5), MySQL, Python, Perl, and some other goodies.

Get your nose out of the book and experiment. Ask questions here after you've tried something and can't get it to work.

Start with small projects and scripts before you attempt the big ones.

Lastly --- have fun. I still get excited when a script I've been writing comes together and produces the exact result I imagined before I started writing it...

Ken