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Originally Posted by Ctechinfo
@tango force - Thanks for the advice and book suggestion. Unfortunately being unemployed for just over a month now I am running on financial fumes so buying a book is not an option right now.
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It was Andrew who gave you the recommendation. I simply showed the book I have and was not happy with. Personally I learned more from the internet than the book. I still have it on the bookshelf but I never bother looking at it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ctechinfo
As far as coding, there are aspects that are over my head so I tend to tweak code til it breaks and I fix it or replace it. The absolute basics of PHP I have picked up along the way (i.e. basic echos, file includes, if/else/elseif statements). Arrays I have a concept what they are and what they do but setting them up myself I am lost.
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An array is purely a list of things. Thats it. When you write your shopping list on a bit of paper, that is an array. For some reason though, because computer people liked to be different and sound clever, they decided to use a new word instead of list and that word was array.
How to set one up? - Easy:
$Array[] = 'item1';
$Array[] = 'item2';
Thats it. You just repeat the $Array bit with square brackets and assign a value to it. It really is that easy. There is a more complex way too (which I rarely use but it's handy if you need to define the index key yourself):
$Array = array('one' => 'item1', '2' => 'item2');
There is also another EASY way to manually define your keys (which makes the above method look stupid):
$Array['one'] = 'item1';
$Array['2'] = 'item2';
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ctechinfo
As far as PHP/MySQL integration I understand the absolute basics in that I know there are different options for the database fields but as far as out puting to pages if I can manage to get it to work it does so pretty half assed.
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Thats only because you're not confident in yourself and your ability. If you spend more time with php and mysql getting to know them both and getting better at what you're doing, you will be a lot more positive about what you're doing. Trust me, if I can write php then so can you. It really isn't that hard you just need to put in a bit of effort - we can't download the knowledge into your brain to save you the hassle unfortunately so a bit of trial and error is called for to learn it the old fashioned way.
What you need to remember is that PHP is basically a text manipulation program. It's main purpose is to manipulate text that you output as html and thats it. No need for complex graphics handling, redrawing, image manipulation etc, you just modify text as needed and use a database to get and store things - that really is it!
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