I was checking to see whether my project was received in good order (haven't received any message yet) when I realised I had completely forgot to update my forum postings...! Instead of consulting the forum everytime, I worked through the lessons and made comments in my study guide... The web proved to be a big help with some of the lessons (can't believe there are so many forums out there).
This course was a real eye-opener as I have never programmed before (not that web development is the same thing).
Regarding the tasks, the course educates you about some of the most common elements of PHP, which I like, but I realise this is only the tip of the iceburg when reading though the reference book I got for the course (a Wrox textbook on PHP):
- Lesson 1: nice introductory tasks, gives you a feel for the language, had no problems when doing the tasks
- Lesson 2: now that I have done the project, I would actually like to go re-test some of the basic functions I didn't use in the project, like the unset function and Switch statement. Lesson 2 introduced an error I would see a lot more of in the coming tasks. I used the $_GET function which in many cases called the data I needed
(e.g. Task 2C-1)
Language: PHP
<?php
function total ($price,$items)
{
$cost = $price * $items;
return $cost;
}
echo "The total price of your purchase is $" . total($_GET["price"], $_GET["items"]);
?>)
- Lesson 3: Task 3B-2 - I did encounter an error - undefined variable. Solved this by changing if(!dir) to if(!isset($dir)) which seemed to solve the problem.
- Lesson 4: I also received errors of undefined variables - in all cases, I used e.g. $firstname=$_POST["firstname"]; so the values would be called.
- Lesson 5: Discovered the missing $_COOKIE function; after that no new problems
- Lesson 6: Had a couple problems with parse errors.. but yet the get the hang of it after a while... This lesson was a great help with the assignment.
Overall, an interesting course... Will definitely be experimenting more on my own.
