MySQL/PHP Classes @ LVS Online

The death toll  from the bush fires in Australia is 181 and counting, but you can help. Sitepoint, an Australian web designcompany,  is offering a huge sale on their excellent books. You can buy five books for the price of one and 100% of the proceeds will go to benefit the brush fire victims. The sale goes through 2/13 so you will want to take advantage of this offer quickly. The loss of home and livelihood has been staggering and the Australian brush victims are in desperate need of assistance now.

Here are some books that I think may be of particular interest for MySQL and PHP students:

The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 2nd Edition

Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL

HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, 2^nd Edition

The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 2^nd Edition

Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS

Simply JavaScript

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

Once you have selected your books, be sure to use the form here to get the sale pricing and to make sure that all proceeds go to the brush fire victims.

LVS students have banded together to create a new PHP study group. This PHP study group is LVS students and alumni that want to help each other in their PHP pursuits. They are beginning with PHP for the World Wide Web, Second Edition (Visual QuickStart Guide) which is an excellent beginning PHP text.

You can join the PHP study group at Hello World.  Kudos to Bonnie and Joanne for taking the initiative to get this going!

Its not too late to register for PHP 101 for Web Developers at LVS Online!

Learn how to use PHP4 or PHP5 to make your web site more dynamic and interactive.  Utilize PHP to automate some of the more mundane tasks of your web site and prevent errors, all while creating a standards compliant web site.

We have changed the staffing of this course to provide a cooperative learning experience. This session of PHP 101 for Web Developers will have an assistant, an instructor  and a back up instructor to help guide you through the assignments.

The online PHP classroom opens on Monday and the first lesson will be posted on 1/10/09. Registration ends soon!

In the second week of the PHP 101 for Web Developers course, we introduce arrays through a Random Image Generator. One of things that confuse students most about arrays is how they count. You are probably really used to starting counting with the number 1. When working with arrays, you have to learn how to count from 0!

Arrays store information in a very precise order. At home, you might keep your household bills in a file box organized by month. If you want to know how much your electric bill was last March, you would look in your folder labeled March, the third folder. That assumes you store your bills by month and by year. What about if you stored your monthly bill folders in alphabetical order. It wouldn’t matter as long as you know where to look.

Arrays aren’t as lax about organization as we might be. PHP arrays always  Read more »

Geeks get a bad rep. Depicted as nerdy dorks, their creativity is often overlooked. I was delighted to come across this blog post  at LifeDev that focused on the creativity and imagination that is unleashed with code.

Working with code is one of the most creative jobs one can have. Programmers have to balance two very different worlds: a world of structure and a world of imagination. They create abstract concepts using very structured programming languages (like PHP or Java).

The author goes on to outline 14 steps to creativity inspired by programmers.

1. Learn a new language
2. Start from the ground up
3. Question everything
4. Do it for fun
5. Never stop testing ideas
6. Find a passion
7. Master your tools
8. Start making abstract associations
9. Think of structure as a tool, not a limitation
10. Don’t rule anything out until you try it
11. Always look for a simpler and more elegant solution
12. Don’t be afraid to build off the code of others
13. Don’t be afraid to collaborate
14. From the basic, create the beautiful

You can read Glen’s description of these 14 lessons in his blog post but I was struck by how many of his lessons we try to incorporate in to our “geeky” courses here at LVS Online. Every week or so, I will tackle one of those lessons in geek creativity here in this blog. You can start with the first lesson, “Learn a new lesson” by signing up for the PHP For Web Developers 101 course!

You will be required to have a hosting account that supports PHP web pages. If you do not have a web site with PHP installed on the server, as an option you can install it on your own computer, however there will be very limited support for this method and you will have no way to post assignments for them to be reviewed. Downloads and information for installing PHP and Apache on your computer can be found at the following web sites:
Download PHP for free here: http://www.php.net/downloads.php
Download Apache for free here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/installation.php

To test whether your web hosting account provides support for PHP, you can download and extract this file test-php.zip and upload it to your server. If your server supports PHP, it should return to you a page listing the PHP configuration on the server. If you are installing PHP and Apache on your own computer, use one of the following links to access this file:

http://localhost/test.php
http://127.0.0.1/test.php

You can register for this course at http://www.lvsassociates.com/register/product_info.php?products_id=136