The process of the learning contract has been a challenge for me. For the first time in my educational life I have had to create and complete an assignment. It has been a very interesting experience for me and I feel that this assignment has helped me prepare for entering the web design industry.
I have developed a yearning for coding websites since the web development one assignment in the first year. After learning CSS [Cascading Style Sheet] and HTML [Hypertext Mark-up language] the next coding language I wanted to learn was PHP [Hypertext Preprocessor]. I wanted to learn PHP as I was eager to learn other coding languages and the fact that I had to borrow PHP scripts for my websites in the first year made it easier for me to choose which coding language to do.
As this assignment was based on learning PHP by myself I decided to try and use different techniques to try and get an understanding of PHP. Using a learning diary was an excellent way for me to write my thoughts and feelings of the learning process. I felt comfortable in writing my problems and the successes of learning PHP. Reading back through the diary has given me time to reflect on how I could have improved my own self learning.
Researching how PHP went into the industry I felt was the right to approach learning PHP. This was my opportunity to speak to professional web designers on how they use PHP and what the benefits would be for me to learn PHP. Most of the professionals that I spoke to were pleased that I decided to learn PHP whilst at college.
Learning PHP was very difficult to understand at first. The reasoning behind that was I had not been able to put PHP into practice. I feel that I learn better by putting some code into practice . Books are not usually my method of learning, but I found them to be much better to understand PHP than a simple tutorial online. Aaron Corby’s recommendation of the Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL by Kevin Yank was an excellent recommendation. I found the book to be very easy to use and easy to follow. I also read the PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide, but I did find it very difficult to understand.
I looked at Youtube videos as a way of learning, but I found the tutorials on there to be were going too quickly for me to understand what was happening. The benefits were that you can actually see what the person was actually doing, which did help me to understand what the code was actually doing.
Once I realised what PHP can do I realised I should have learnt it much earlier than I did. From contact forms to creating content management systems, PHP is vital for a website to meet the operational capabilities for a client.
I gave myself the task of designing a website which included a members log in page and a database driven statistics page. At first I thought that I had bitten off my than I could chew. The website was going to have many different elements that I had only around three weeks to create it. The creative brief I gave myself was very different to what I have done in the past. Creating a stock management site which allowed only specific users to log in and update the site. I decided to go outside my comfort zone to challenge myself.
Creating the website was easy on the HTML & CSS side, but when it got to the PHP side I struggled at times. The log in form was very easy to code up in my opinion. Using a MySQL database to put in the user name and password information was very easy to use in my opinion. From reading the Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL by Kevin Yank I was able to use PHP to connect to the database which allowed my website to have logging capabilities. I was proud of achieving a fully functioning login page.
The stock management page was very stressful to create. One minute I would be happy as I would have got a solution to my problems and the next I would lose my cool when problems were occurring. After around 15 hours of being at the same place it all clicked into place and my stock management page was completed. I had decided to allow my users to enter the information into a form, which would then go into a database, and then it would show the information in a dynamic table. To make the table update itself I created a delete function which would delete a specific row of information.
The testing went through smoothly and the website did not present any problems which gave me a huge smile on my smile.
Reflecting on the self learning process I feel that I have learnt a lot in a short amount of time. It was not only learning PHP that I benefitted from. My time management and organisational skill improved throughout the process. At times I did worry about not being able to complete my learning contract. Now looking back I should not have worried and just been focused on completing the learning contract. Self learning I feel has been of a huge benefit to me and I hope that it bodes me well for the future, especially with the professional projects after Christmas.
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