Page 1 of 1

Need help learning

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2010 11:25 am
by Nishio
Hello everybody, I'm Nishio and I started to program like a month ago, my basic idea was to be able to create websites and to work as a freelancer, I know HTML and CSS from what I can design a simple website, but most of the people who look for freelancers also look for PHP/ASP knowledge, and I know some basics of PHP, like variables, booleans and NULL, constants, arrays, if statement, but I don't know how to acctualy do anything a little more complex with it.
So I guess what I am asking for is a mentor, somebody who would tell and show me how do I connect PHP with web design I already know.
And no I do not have any money, so I am basicly asking for somebody who has nothing to do for 1/2 hours a day and knows PHP.
Thanks in advance, and sorry if I posted in a wrong section.

Re: Need help learning

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2010 12:10 pm
by Jonah Bron
The Internet is your mentor. That may sound disappointing, but that means the collective effort of all PHP/etc. developers is directed at you. There are (hundreds of) thousands of tutorials and articles covering any problem you might encounter as you move forward in your learning.
  1. Read tutorials
  2. Make things
  3. Ask questions (here)
  4. Post code in the Critique section
  5. Rinse, repeat
Install SVN or Git, and keep a repository of all your little projects; sometimes you learn things and forget them, and have to look back at something you already figured out.

The most important thing is that you have fun. If you don't enjoy it, don't do it.

Re: Need help learning

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2010 3:55 pm
by thinsoldier
Find someone to learn along side you. Whatever you don't understand, they might understand. While you connect with more helpful developers on this forum they can make friends on another forum and double the # of people who are likely to directly help you. It helps a lot more sometimes to brainstorm in person than in text on a forum.

Also learn math and some visual programming like 2d canvas/processing.js or one of those make your own windows games frameworks.

Code that runs realtime is (in my opinion) a lot more fun than writing a php page that runs once and spits out some html. Skills from both kinds are universally useful.