If I'm honest, this week hasn't been the most productive. I've struggled to settle into the rhythm of working through the PHP in 24 Hours book, although I have got a few of the chapters done. If I'm honest, I'm beginning to worry now that I won't get the stuff I need to learn done in time.
So what am I going to do? I'm going to take a more pragmatic approach to my learning. Rather than going cover to cover through the book, I'm going to focus on learning the stuff I need to in order to complete my creative brief. This will start tomorrow at College.
I'm also struggling a bit with self-discipline at the moment. I'm sat doing the work but often find myself tired and this makes it hard to keep my concentration up. As such, I've taken action this week to cut back on commitments in other areas of my life. It's important that I focus on my study over the next few months, and hopefully by freeing myself up at key times I'll be able to work more productively.
As well as working hard on PHP, I'm also hoping to meet up with Dan Cooper, who I'll be building the website for, during this next week. As he's a designer himself, the creative process is going to be different to usual, as it will be a much more collaborative effort. Whilst this may turn out to be difficult, I'm really looking forward to the new experience and challenges this can bring me.
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Monday, 16 February 2009
First Week of Self-Teaching PHP
Welcome to my journal to help me record and evaluate the process of learning PHP, as part of my study on the HND Interactive Media (soon to become FdA Web Design). After completing the written part of the assignment, I've moved onto the actual learning of the language.
The first week of learning PHP has proved to be a bit of a mixed bag. My priority for the week has been to become familiar with the language itself, in terms of it's syntax & semantics. I feel on the whole I've done this, and have also gone further in exploring functions and how these operate. However, I feel in order to keep up with the pace of the assignment, I may need to work much more quickly and effectively.
I think the most productive way for me to learn thus far has been using SAMS PHP in 24 Hours. This has had a clearly laid out process for learning PHP in 24 chapters. I have found, however, that 24 hours is very optimistic... in fact, most chapters have taken closer to 2 hours to complete.
I have also tried to get into reading Programming PHP, but this has been less fruitful - I feel the language used in this isn't as plain and it seems to assume a prior knowledge of programming languages such as C - something I don't have. As such, I feel I'm going to leave this book for a while to revisist later.
On the whole, I'm pretty happy with the progress I've made this week and feel happy with how my knowledge has grown - although I'm honestly finding it harder than expected to get a grasp of it!
The first week of learning PHP has proved to be a bit of a mixed bag. My priority for the week has been to become familiar with the language itself, in terms of it's syntax & semantics. I feel on the whole I've done this, and have also gone further in exploring functions and how these operate. However, I feel in order to keep up with the pace of the assignment, I may need to work much more quickly and effectively.
I think the most productive way for me to learn thus far has been using SAMS PHP in 24 Hours. This has had a clearly laid out process for learning PHP in 24 chapters. I have found, however, that 24 hours is very optimistic... in fact, most chapters have taken closer to 2 hours to complete.
I have also tried to get into reading Programming PHP, but this has been less fruitful - I feel the language used in this isn't as plain and it seems to assume a prior knowledge of programming languages such as C - something I don't have. As such, I feel I'm going to leave this book for a while to revisist later.
On the whole, I'm pretty happy with the progress I've made this week and feel happy with how my knowledge has grown - although I'm honestly finding it harder than expected to get a grasp of it!
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