@conoiseur Ahsante brathe
There are no short-cuts to becoming a great developer…you may think you are saving time by starting from the top but you will waste so much time struggling with very basic fundamental issues that you would have taken a few days to familiarize yourself with.
1st of all anyone telling you to “learn” a CMS first is messing you up.
if you have never done any kind of programming before- :
Start with a general book that will teach you about fundamental concepts in programming in a very simple way… loops, conditional statements , functions, what a compiled language vs and interpreted language is … these concepts could be illustrated in different languages but would be great if it was in a language like C or C++ or java, these are very similar to php in syntax and structure , in fact php is implemented using the C language…
Back in the days we used to be introduced to programming using C, and i found it so helpful because most languages are easy to learn after that…
After that go to basic application concepts like web servers, database servers etc understand why they are needed and how they work together… you don’t need to go very deep at this stage…
This should take you a few days if you are just above average mentally… after understanding these concepts you will be well armed on why you are doing php and why CMS are needed
Then look for a good book on the php language …
Recommendations
1. The Joy of PHP Programming: A Beginner’s Guide – by Alan Forbes
2. PHP & MySQL Novice to Ninja – by Kevin Yank
3.Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites – by Robin Nixon
4. Programming PHP – by Kevin Tatroe, Peter MacIntyre & Rasmus Lerdorf “Foreword By: Michael Bourque” - published by O-reilly - a great book.
In the course of reading these books , setup the LAMP/WAMP platforms because you need to actually write code to learn.
After grasping some basic concepts and can write simple code, also find out why javascript is needed in web development and how it’s used together with php… am sure you will also stumble upon javascript libraries and frameworks and get to know how they make javascript easy to work with…
Also find out why php frameworks are needed - Laravel is a great framework…
Make internet your friend, search, read, copy and implement examples … it may look daunting at first but with some resilience and enough time you will be finding writing php code easier than writing an English story.
well, this is a lot of information to process. Thank you so so much for it… Now, what is your advice on this: am taking online training at freecodecamp.org and w3schools.com. is it the right track of am wasting time?
Welcome.
Just start with the books i have recommended for you …esp 3 and 4, the good thing with these books is that they cover all topics and they are written by very experienced educators.
There is a big difference between knowing something and knowing how to teach it… don’t dismiss the online versions but you will go there when you have a specific issue or if the concept is not well explained in the book… plus after you start developing you will be getting solutions from many online sources… learning does not stop.
NB/get a soft copy of the books in pdf so that you can copy past the examples easily
would you kindly sent me the PDF copies or links just to make sure i have the right copy. please… juuu either sioni or am getting different versions
@eddy mahelo the reason why I told him to learn a CMS is for income. Learning programming the way you have outlined for him is all well and good but it will take him sometime before he can become productive and make money with it. With a CMS, especially wordpress, he can be doing websites for people as he continues to learn what you have outlined. Remember, I told him to learn a CMS and then continue with programming lessons and not to ONLY learn a CMS.
I believe this path is more practical as he can have an income here and there (which can also motivate him to learn more) rather than learn coding only whereby it may take him quite a while to earn anything
True , bills have to be paid, but at least having a basic understanding of how a web server , a database server and php work together is very important, a week of trying to understand is not too much…even your speed of working with wordpress will be high…imagine doing wordpress and you don’t even understand what the wp-config file does or even how you can edit the simple header.php file to make some custom tweaks…
In all fairness to OP’s initial post, we can agree that working with WordPress as a developer needs some knowledge of the Lamp stack. Some exposure to debugging Apache errors, ini files, .htacces etc. There’s no harm indeed in doing WordPress, but also get to learn how build a mobile-responsive website from scratch using HTML/CS without necessarily relying on the power of a CMS. It’s also good to note that certain requirements will determine choice of development stack; whether to build from scratch or use a CMS.
I prefer hard coding if u rlly want to master programming…but if u wanna earn from a site use word press and other cms… As for me I do hardcoding and am comfortable infact I reuse codes so my work is pretty simple as a designer3
I would advise you to jump straight to PHP though it will require that you also learn SQL. You should probably install XAMPP. I have no knowledge of any CMS and I rarely use JavaScript. I use frameworks and I do just fine. Though if you want quick money in the Kenyan market you are better off learning CMSes in the long run as stated above
Interesting. I have dabbled in symphony and zend but never really done website stuff with it. Out of curiosity, which framework do you like to use?
I like Codeigniter
Heard of it but not used it. Btw whats your IDE of choice when doing php?
Hehe. No IDE. I use a text editor. Sublime or Atom does it for me
Hey name sake, I learned web development both using WordPress and the coding way but I don’t know how to get a job, please give me tips on how to find a web development job
PHPStorm is the One IDE to rule them all when it comes to PHP.
shit gets hard sometimes and that programming knowledge comes in handy
sio kwa ubaya but the income you will earn with this is just basic income and nothing serious if you dont understand the basics of code like how @eddy mahelo has explained
True. But you guys appear to be misunderstanding me. I am not saying he gives up on learning serious code. Far from it. What I am saying is that it will take time for him to earn serious money because for you to reach that level of earning serious cash will take time. The guy mentioned that he is finding coding difficult and he feels like giving up. SO IN THE MEAN TIME, AS YOU ARE LEARNING SERIOUS CODING, BUILD FOR GUYS WEBSITES USING WORDPRESS and the like. Even if the income is limited, you have to start somewhere. And that income may motivate you to redouble your efforts to learn more.
Also, it will give you hands on experience of handling clients and you will find youself in a position where you are forced to research stuff related to coding as you go deeper and deeper into wordpress. But the fact is, with wordpress, you can put up a site without being an advanced developer. So start there. Earn some income and continue learning coding. At some point, he will get to being an expert dev earning good income but he has to start somewhere.
shida yake si eti coding ni difficult but ni kuruka ruka badala ya kufuata tutorials in order. si tuliongea about hii issue kwa ile post yake ingine