Sunday, October 19, 2008

Personal Home Page: PHP Programming

The Library has sent me to two PHP programming classes so far, two more to go but not until December so I get a bit of a break. My past two Saturdays have been spent learning the fundamentals of PHP -- which stands for PHP: Hypertext Processor, a programming language originally known as Personal Home Page -- which will hopefully help me see what's going on behind the scenes of the Library's websites a little more effectively. I think it will also come in handy creating some original apps, but not until after December's advanced PHP programming classes. For now I'm going to just experiment with PHP from home...

Last night I installed the PHP Apache Module for OS X on my MacBook (13" black laptop which runs some hacked up version of Unix.) Now I can exicute PHP pages right here on my laptop. Ah, fun times! I'm actually having a bit of trouble running the processes I'm writing, but anytime I've snagged code from the Web all seems to work properly. So before I start in on some tyrade about Macs or Unix, I'm going to assume the problem is that I just don't know enough yet. That's why I'm doing this, to learn PHP and better understand Apache and Unix in general.

When I asked the instructor if he recommended a book on PHP, he said he really just recommends the PHP Manual at php.net, which was great news. I'm more comfortable with online resources anyway. Who needs to lug a big old PHP Bible around? I'm not going to be programming anything on the bus ride in to work in the morning. I'm only going to be programming in PHP when I'm in front of an actual computer.

Now, back to the topic of my bus ride in to work. I would be lost without my iPhone! The first thing I do when I get on the bus is go straight to the iPod-portion of the phone and start up some music. Then I get to business. I tweet that I'm on the bus into work, just so everyone knows, everyday, then I read my Facebook news and status updates. After doing this I'm usually about 2 or 3 songs into my ride. I'll send a text message or two, just letting my friend Lisa know I'm still coming to NYC on Friday for a concert, making sure I still have a couch to sleep on. Then I'm downtown.

1 comment:

George Jetson said...

What's the deal with your blog, dude? Why do you land on one site and then get redirected here?