If the last few weeks are anything to go by; torturously low levels of sleep, dangerously high levels of caffeine, and by resisting the persistent temptation to hurl my laptop into traffic.
The time has come to evaluate PPD3, and I’m not entirely sure where I begin to deconstruct the last few weeks. At last, after a lot of sleepless nights, I have a working image gallery complete with a photo uploader and login system. However, the process of actually building it turned out to be much more difficult than I’d ever imagined.
My mistake, really, was biting off far more than I could actually chew. When I wrote my learning contract, I was full of hopes and aspirations. I had little idea of the difficulty of learning a new programming language, and as a result set the bar very high. I wrote that I would build an image gallery where users could upload their own, and comment on each others images. I may as well have said I’d land an elephant on the Moon; the level of stress that ensued would have been about the same.
I began by reading the Sitepoint book ‘How to Build a Database Driven Website with PHP and MySQL’ by Kevin Yank. I started working my way through the process of building the joke database the book is centered around, but I found the methods used in the book difficult to really absorb. I’m not sure if this is a common issue with tutorials in general, but it felt like I was just repeating orders in a parrot-like fashion; the book would tell me to type something and so I’d type it, but was I really taking in what was being said? It didn’t really feel like I was.
In addition, progress was slow. I managed to get to a stage where I had a working joke database that users could add and delete jokes from, but I seemed to be hitting errors left right and centre. With not long left until the deadline I made the decision to move ahead and begin working on my image gallery.
I decided that the method of learning prescribed in the Sitepoint book simply wasn’t working, and having been told that there were some decent tutorials available online, I decided to give them a go. I came across a tutorial on Sitepoint called ‘Build An Automated PHP Gallery System In Minutes’. ‘Minutes’ probably isn’t really accurate, but it was still a useful guide and by following it through, and reading the discussion pages on the forum, I managed to build a basic photo gallery, with an uploader system. Although the feeling that I was just ‘following orders’ was still there, at least this tutorial was targeted towards my end goal.
I also had to build a login and registration system, so that only registered users could upload images. To do this I found a set of tutorials on About.com that take you through the process of building a secure system, and I actually found this to be a fairly simple task. The difficulty came with integrating the system with my image gallery, and setting up cookies. However, with some persistence I soon figured this out.
Regardless of the outcome of this unit, I am going to go back and delve deeper into PHP, because in all honesty I only feel like I’ve scratched the surface of what is to be learned. I suppose a fair amount of knowledge will come from actually using it day-to-day, however I will go back and possibly read a different book or other tutorials in order to expand my knowledge, without the pressure of time constraints.
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