Ethan, before you get frustrated or feel abandoned, let me *sincerely* try to help:
Here is honestly what I am utterly convinced you need to do to get any where in the medium/long run: Break everything down into very small steps. Making web apps is just building a whole lot of layers/collections of very small simple things. Nothing is out of your grasp.. it only appears mysterious or complicated because you are not familiar with the terms/code structures and have not spent enough time with the little things to recognize them like english speakers do when reading written english. So what you do to get out of the woods (and it works every time), regardless of the problem, is just focus on one small thing at a time. START OVER. Throw out all the code, especially everything you borrowed from other sources. Write everything yourself, from scratch. Just print "hello" to a web page. Then add in the ability to do ONE more thing that you need... like reading from a db, or writing to a db... and then processing/manipulating things, as you need. Test everything every time you add even ONE little feature. Then as soon as something breaks, you know instantly where the issue lays.. and focus on solving why that one little thing is broken. If re-reading the docs about whatever code structures you used at that point (of your newly-added broken feature) does not clear it up for you, then post just that ONE little issue to this list.. asking why that one thing is behaving that way. Like this (using this tedious but effective method) , you will get your code into shape so it works, you will not alienate yourself from the help you need (by posting volumes of broken code with no evidence that you are actually trying to learn), and best of all - you will, step by step, come to master all this stuff! Everyone loves to help answer/clear up one little thing, but no one has time to digest a whole broken page/app and tell you where all the issues are. Even if they did have the time and inclination, they would lose it after the very first time they saw you take what they gave you and come back 3 weeks later with evidence that you never learned anything from the last episode. Believe me you will always have people climbing over each other to help you, if you can just break down your problems into such small portions that you will be able to realize you have the smarts to answer them yourself. ;-) There is a very lively, effective and popular coders community (and Q/A tool set) here: http://stackoverflow.com/ ..where you get almost instant help to any coding question.. because there are so many people who really care to give quality help, because they get recognized for their contributions. But if you try to use the tools at stackoverflow.com then you will find there, in that very professional atmosphere, that (to get anywhere) you HAVE to ask questions that are distilled down to something very specific and answerable in a specific/factual kind of way, as opposed to question that bring up more fuzzy-boundaried topics, like questions of preference or style, or questions that show an utter lack of homework/effort on the part of the asker which require more than a couple specific facts to answer. You can train here or on stackoverflow.com, but anywhere you go, you will find the same situation, that you have to use baby steps (as necessary) - for your own learning, and to get any decent help. -Govinda -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
