----- Original Message ----- From: "Smile-Poet" > I realise that I am not going to convince those on the list > who really do know their MySQL/PHP from their > 'embonpoint' to get to gether for a book
I think Sheila's got the most important point. What I know is programming. I was taught programming formally in a 2 years' part-time college course (HNC) in 1984-1986 and again at a higher level (HND) 1989-90 using various BASICs, C, Assembler (Intel 6502 and VAX Macro-32), microcode, Pascal and COBOL, have been sent on formal short courses in ICL 2966 COBOL and SCL, IBM Rexx/CMS and the Unix Bourne shell, spent over two years programming COBOL for a living and over the past twenty years have played around and done some programming in Z80 assembler, Fortran, LISP, Pilot, MS Quickbasic, MS-DOS batch language, Smalltalk, VAX DCL, Forth, Logo, Prolog, George 3, ICL Plan and DME, IBM 360 Assembler, Visual BASIC and others, even wrote a CESIL interpreter and got some way into inventing a weird language that had a "Come from" as well as a "Go to"... My point being, it's like driving a car. If you can drive, you can drive, and getting into a new car is just a matter of seeing where the switches are on this one. I never had to learn javascript or php, or even Perl really, once I had a language reference to look up. So, maybe you think you need some code examples that do what you want, and enough grasp of what's going on to figure out if they're broke and how to fix them, but *really*, you're learning programming with php as the example. And in fact, you might even do better if there were such a thing as a pure language-independent programming course. Nearest I've seen to that is a programming environment called Inglish (not Inglish the language, which The Hobbit was written in) where you wrote down what you wanted the program to do and the preprocessor wrote a program based on that. Bit like what we call "pseudo code" So for instance we might design a program like this: Initialise variables Get query string variables 'id' and 'password' Query database for these values If found: Redirect to menu page; Else: Set an error message That could then be written as a Perl CGI script, php, ASP or whatever - first we break down the problem into a series of steps to solve it, then we implement that program logic in our selected language. Experience in this allows you to look at your own or someone else's finished code and see the logical structure that underlies it, which is how you find where errors are and work out how to fix them. If you don't learn programming itself as well as the operators, functions etc that make up the language, you are in the position of a tourist in a foreign country with just a phrase book and a dictionary. You can't ask any questions except the ones in the phrase book, and the dictionary is almost no use if you don't know how to put the words together. To sum up - I can't write a book on php, as I know almost as much as you about the language. But I can use it and understand how it works a lot better, because I'm a programmer. Unfortunately the sort of programming I know how to do is now out of date - as I never learned Ada, Eiffel, C++ or more recently Java, I am almost lost with object-oriented programming with its classes, methods, instances and inheritance. php is going that way, and even, Lord help us, Javascript. So, aha, I can't even write a book on programming :-/ ____ • The WDVL Discussion List from WDVL.COM • ____ To Join wdvltalk, Send An Email To: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Send Your Posts To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To set a personal password send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words: "set WDVLTALK pw=yourpassword" in the body of the email. To change subscription settings to the wdvltalk digest version: http://wdvl.internet.com/WDVL/Forum/#sub ________________ http://www.wdvl.com _______________________ You are currently subscribed to wdvltalk as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. Attn: Discussion List Management 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Please include the email address which you have been contacted with.
