Do you need to go to uni to learn web development (namely php)?

[twentyeight]

Hi all, I hope you can give me some opinions. If you want to skip the romance just answer the question in bold at the bottom of this post.

I left school at 16 to do a 2 year traineeship in web design/dev for a small marketing company. The second that was over, I moved from my crappy home town to the city and placed a new job - also for a small marketing company. My role at these companies has been to slice up designs given to me, code them using HTML & CSS, and integrate them into various CMS's.

After working full-time for nearly 3 years doing this, I'm extremely quick and fluent at HTML & CSS, and knowledgeable about validation/writing clean code/etc. I know the basics of JavaScript, jQuery and PHP - enough to install plug ins, edit them where I need to, and do very basic dynamic effects on websites.

Now at 18 years old, I have just been offered a job as a Junior Web Developer for a bigger (+ extremely creative & awesome) company. They showed me some of the exciting projects they have going. These websites use a lot more javascript/PHP than I am used to, and are much more dynamic. While I have basic knowledge of these languages, it's certainly not to the extent (yet!) where I could write a full program. The position offers the opportunity to move into writing mobile applications (in future).

Which begs the question... With 3 years working experience doing front-end web development, am I just as capable of learning PHP (using online resources), as a student fresh out of uni?

[sunfighter]

Look here http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp and see if you can learn from here. They have js and jq also. I think it takes years of working with these languages before you can claim your proficient in them. Most of us learn new things every day.

[tracknut]

Given the way you've been learning so far, I'd say go for it, you should be able to pick up PHP. The gap you might have is that your focus will be on delivering solutions, not learning computer science. On the job training leaves little time for learning about algorithms, performance optimization, security, and I'm sure other things that aren't coming to mind. Those things can be critically important, but not every day.

Dave

[twentyeight]

Thank you both for your opinions!

I'm going to attempt to do a lot of research from home. My partner has some old "grade 12" programming work books that explain the fundamentals I might miss out on. Otherwise it's down to good old google...

Thanks again

[d'Anconia]

I learned PHP without doing Computer Science (or anything related) at Uni. Just realize that much of what you will be writing will include conditionals (eg 'if', 'else', etc) and scripts.

Once you get used to the notation PHP actually becomes pretty fun. I have found it to be a powerful language (I'm still a beginner though).