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Posted by kenoli on 10/27/06 16:40
As a person that was a beginner at this not that long ago, I think you
should expect it to take quite a bit of time, like days, for instance.
These are the difficulties I have found in starting out in php:
1. Getting a sense of the internal logic of php and the internal logic
of coding if you haven't done this before takes some time. For me, it
was not always instinctual or obvious how things worked. Things are
also not necessarily consistent and I find that there seem to be things
that experience programmers think are obvious that it is really hard
for me to get. There is a lot of stuff carried over from C or java
that people familiar with other languages understand that can seem
crazy to the unititiated.
2. Finding out what is possible and how to do it is often a challenge
and is related to the last comment. My experience is that php.net is
more useful once you understand php than when you are starting. It is
not always obvious to me how to even formulate the question I want
answered. And php seems to search and index around functions.
Operators and conventions are often hard to find.
3. Debugging, e.g. finding the missing period or quotation mark or
curly brace can take hours or even days. It is always startling to me
how the simplest synatactical error can completely break a script. I
would say the biggest leap forward for me in php programming was
learning how to troubleshoot a script in a finite amount of time. You
could be right on target with a minor syntactical error or you could
have missed the mark a mile with your script and in either case, it
won't work at all. In html it breaks or works wrong, giving you some
clues. In php, you just get a rejection.
4. Ask other people for help, but only after you have tried to come up
with a solution yourself. I have found people on this list and others
to be very supportive. It is important to formulate your questions
clearly and specifically and to have done some work yourself first to
solve your problem. It can be helpful as well, when you are starting
out on something to see if people can point you in the right direction.
Then try to implement it yourself and if it doesn't work, ask more
questions.
5. I think doing what you want to do would be a challenge for someone
with no experince with php. And this script also seems to require an
understanding of unix and DOS and the way they relate to each other and
to php. And anything that has to do with Windows or Microsoft seems to
me to amplify any kind of interface issue with other systems, as
Microsoft seems to have an anti-body against interfacing with anything
not Microsoft. I avoid Microsoft like the plague.
6. Get a MAC! They talk with everyone.
Good luck,
--Kenoli
Synapse Syndrome wrote:
>
> How long do you think it would take a beginner to go through this script and
> get it running on Windows as PHP?
>
> Cheers.
>
> ss.
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