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!