On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 12:04 AM, Philip Olson <phi...@roshambo.org> wrote:
> > Greetings all, > > Also, I reckon the main PHP tutorial should get someone started but not > worry > about all of the minor details along the way. An ideal tutorial might, > let's > say, allow someone to create a nice address book app or TODO manager, but > not > a framework. Said TODO manager should probably include JavaScript, although > how far php.net should go with these related topics (e.g., CSS) is > difficult > to answer. Not very far, I guess. > There is a lot of foundation knowledge required to build and entire site from scratch. While I like the idea of having a tutorial on php.net that teaches you how to build something that might actually be useful, I fear that it may prove more useless than the existing tutorial to a beginner. My reasoning behind this comes from past experience. When I first started learning PHP (back when I was still on this ancient technology called dialup) I wasn't in the least bit interested to read a tutorial that showed me how to build a specific application. I was purely interested in finding the information I needed to get done what I needed done at that time. PHP is a great language where you can just take an idea you have in your head and start banging out code to see if it works. We should be teaching beginners things like basic syntax, operators, data types, looping constructs, conditional constructs, etc... Without knowing how this stuff works first they don't stand much of a chance when they want to add a new feature to this address book they built. I find that once a beginner starts seeing results are they immediately excited and once they see their code break they are instantly discouraged. To be more helpful I propose we revamp the tutorial to explain real world concepts that apply to learning things like string syntax, operator precedence, recursion, variable scope, and handling things like building a dynamic ordered/unordered list in HTML using a foreach loop (which is a pretty common beginner problem). Applying these fundamental concepts of writing structured code in real life scenarios is going to be far more beneficial to a beginner than learning HTML/CSS (in my own very modest opinion). With that said I'm not opposed to adding multiple tutorials to cover such subjects as how to build an address book or TODO list, etc... Sherif, The one who sometimes wonders where the time went.
