Re: [PHP] Should This Newbie Learn From Dreamweaver?

On Apr 22, 2008, at 9:04 PM, revDAVE wrote:

> First of all - I know this is an entirely subjective question, and I  
> know
> there's no single approach to learning this technology. I'm just  
> looking for
> a few hints from seasoned professionals basically whether Dreamweaver
> verbose code (at least it looks like that to me at this beginning  
> point) is
> all 'needed & necessary'...
>
> I have a background using ColdFusion, however I am new to php / mySQL.
>
> I am caught between two learning approaches:
>
> 1 -  I know that generally, it is better to build my knowledge from  
> the
> 'bottom up' - coding by hand from books and such etc. - and so far I  
> have
> been doing that with php and mySQL. Slowly I am getting there. Php  
> is quite
> powerful and impressive.

When I first started learning PHP/MySQL just about a year ago, I  
started using dreamweaver 8, just for the code completion/syntax  
highlighting though... I wanted to be able to visually see where I  
missed a ' or a " type of thing.

One of the best ways I've found to learn everything though is to take  
a simple script that is close to what you want, and change it to fit  
your needs... You can learn alot about how other people code... Which  
always helped me.

Or do what tedd does.. Build an example of everything that gets asked  
on the list... See if you can figure it out, once you understand how  
to do it, fixing and extending it is much easier.
>

And in regards to the code you posted... That did seem a little  
verbose.. It probably works great being so specific and all... But my  
simple queries tend to work good most of the time as well :)