Like a peaceful meadow after a trek through dense jungle, or the eye of a hurricane, PHP was a welcome relief, a lot more intuitive, and pretty fun.
The Basics on PHP
PHP is a server side language, and is the “P” in the LAMP environments that run a good deal of the internet (not general dinner table conversation, I know). As I understand it, PHP allows your site to interact with the server and be more dynamic (e.g. Mobile friendly and responsive sites are made so with PHP).
I was very excited to learn PHP for three main reasons:
- WordPress sites are built mostly using HTML, CSS, and PHP. Finally, I’m moving on to the right lanugage!
- PHP has many other applications outside of WordPress, especially with SaaS web applications, something else I wanted to explore.
- It wasn’t JavaScript!
By the time I had started learning about PHP, I was well into setting up a site for a client that was using the Genesis Framework, and was heavy on the PHP side of things. I had been communication with the developers of the theme, and they were supplying me with some of the PHP code I needed (they were SO helpful). However, I tried to edit a piece of the code by myself toward the end of it all, and…
Crash, broken, locked out of the site!!!
I had been very brash and not set up an FTP connection (actually, I didn’t know I could do that at the time). Thankfully, I had several backups of the site, but lost several hours of work.
Lesson learned.
Estimated hours of learning and practice for PHP: 14
Estimated value of learning from crashing a site, and having to redo three hours of work: priceless.
CodeAcademy offers courses on Python and Ruby and has many other resources like Web Projects and API projects. After 60 days, and finishing the learning I needed, I moved on to other things…