BetterPHP

Watch tutorials or create your own projects? What do you guys think?

I am learning both through tutorials and creating a mini project (a very simple contact form)

For me, I need to understand the basics of the programme I am learning (php) in order for me to code and build onto it.

I jumped straight into the deep end with creating a mailing list inj php, although I completed it and understand how that all works, I can look at it and fully know what it all means but wouldn't be able to mod it as I don't know the coding well enough to add any of my mods into it.

I would reccomend doing the both anyway, it is the only way to understand and make mistakes that you learn from

unemployment wrote:Watch tutorials or create your own projects? What do you guys think?

I started with HTML, then moved on to CSS and finally learning PHP and MySQL. Maybe I continue with JavaScript, not sure really.

I started with W3Schools, and after grabbing the basics, I found BetterPHP and PHPAcademy and their video tutorials, they are great. I also found some very nice ebooks about PHP and MySQL and I am going over them too. Video tutorials and books are great sources, but you cannot exactly learn something before trying to do it yourself.

For that reason, I started working on a new website of my friend and adding PHP features as I learn. Learning at the same time trying to accomplish something is a great way for me to learn something. Because I am not that kind of coder who learns everything first in case he needs that knowledge later. I tend to learn better when I need it.

pasqo83 wrote:I would reccomend doing the both anyway, it is the only way to understand and make mistakes that you learn from

Agreed.

You can learn how to do some things from tutorials, but you need to get creative to really learn the language and you can only do that by attempting things yourself... hence my challenges

It's like any spoken language, the best way to learn it is to just jump in.

That's just my opinion though, you will have to find the best thing that works for you

Try to create a project which you think you are incapable of doing. Ask for help throughout on the specific functions, but try and work through the logic on your own.

Figuring out the logic of PHP is probably 3/4's of learning it. Syntax and actual functions plus coding techniques are very minor to the logistics.

Dylan wrote:Try to create a project which you think you are incapable of doing.

How about my own CMS - where do I start? lol

pasqo83 wrote:

Dylan wrote:Try to create a project which you think you are incapable of doing.

How about my own CMS - where do I start? lol

Ask yourself this; what needs to get done? How do you want to go about doing it?

Learning basic mark-up ([X]HTML, XML, CSS) and JavaScript were pretty easy for me to learn textually from w3schools.
However, w3schools couldn't help me learn php or SQL. There's something about the inability ti actually see the affect right there on the browser made it confusing for me.
So PHP/SQL were done easy for me in video format, credits to phpacademy and betterphp




So basically, for me… any other method of teaching suck!