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Would someone help me start up?

Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 4:27 pm
by MisterHamper
Hello. I am new to this site, and also to PHP. I have done plenty of HTML before though. I have read the 15 parts of Zend's "PHP 101" carefully over the last week, so I do understand the basics. But I just can't seem to figure out how and where to start. I want to make some kind of kcal-counter that I am sure will be able to help people, but I am not entirely sure where to begin. I have alot of good ideas I want to implement my-self to the program. But that beginning seems to be the hard part I must say. I have no idea where to begin at all. :(
If someone would want to help me create the bare "backbone" of the program, I would be very happy. I don't think it will take much time to do. Then I can add all the others things I want to it later myself. :) Please PM, e-mail or just write in this thread if interested in helping me, and I clean explain further what I mean :) I appreciate it! :D

Re: Would someone help me start up?

Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 10:26 am
by SteveC
It's important to understand the backbone of your application, ignorance makes for bad programming.

I'd recommend downloading some PHP examples and reading them, see if you can figure out what they're going to do before you try them. This might help you build your backbone.

What do you actually need for it? I'm not willing to code it for you, but perhaps I can point you in the right direction.

Re: Would someone help me start up?

Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 11:00 am
by MisterHamper
Yeah I understand what you're saying. If i tell you what the backbone is about, maybe you can point me in the right direction regarding to what kind of codes I need to use for it? Does that sound like a good idea? :) Because right now I am kinda lost on where to start etc, PHP is new to me but I learn pretty fast when I have something I need to do

Re: Would someone help me start up?

Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 10:03 am
by j.smith1981
What SteveC (cool username btw :) was saying, is what I do for my current full time employment.

Try reading the script and using online references to work out what they actually do, like I have just managed to get my head around form validation in JScript, its actually pritty cool, rather basic as a language though in some ways but the syntax is like that of PHP, because their all based, the most functional languages I like to think personally come off C, certainly the most efficient of languages I think, but can be quite advanced.

Like if a script has say isset, actually google that in (excuse any function declaring here is quite inaccurate just going off complete memory), but isset, I think of as is it set? Actually what your asking, does that contain a value the answer to that is yes or no, meaning in programming theory or talk as such is a boolean, a booleans always either yes or no.

With isset you can detect if a comments forms for example has been legitimately sent using the web form rather than a spam bot, very rough way of doing this, using the gd library for making your own images and making some kind of checksum I think it is, to make the user type in a random code would be a better way of doing this, but not every one has the php extension/module for this, so isset could be the next best thing.

Its just seeing what fits really and using practical examples, I encourage you to keep at it, learning a programming language is much like learning a spoken language, takes years to perfect and become fluent, keep on looking at a peice of code over and over.

Maybe if your not being productive for months (cant take anything in for ages), take a big break from it, like a week month maybe even a year, eventually when you go back and mature up about programming itself, it'll start making sense when you come back, what I was told at University, programmings the most creative part in the Computing & IT Industry, someones or some people have had to sit down and code photoshop, word, excel whatever, so its them thats the most creative people in computing!

But like all creativity, all creative people hit a block at some points, I've had 3 so far and I code in VBA at work for macro processes, its amazing when it just clicks and you spend days just coding, from using old functions and modifying them.

Good luck anyhow,
Jez!