2 Beginners Guides I wish I had had when I started with PHP

Everybody starts somewhere. I started (officially) with my Commodore 64. I wrote my first commercial program on it and it started a life-long obsession with programming. Being a self-taught programmer, there are gaps in my education. The 2 biggest areas I have trouble with are Recursion and Graphics. Thank (generic deity reference) for the Web. While surfing around today, I stumbled upon 2 tutorials covering those two areas. They are well written, informative and free so I thought I’d share them with you on the off-chance you struggle with them as well.

First, recursion. They say great minds think alike; They lie. If that were so, I would have been able to grasp the concepts of recursion long before I read this article. (Well, ok, I grasp them, I just have trouble implementing them at times) The boys over at DevShed have published an excellent tutorial written by Alejandro Gervasio. Alejandro deftly understates the issue in the first sentence by stating:

Iteration is a straightforward concept. Recursion is a bit more complicated;

This is the first of a 3 part article. It’s 4 pages long and aimed squarely at the beginner to low-mid-level programmers. If nothing else, pull up the web page and keep it handy for when the boss is headed down the hall and you are reading Dilbert. Swap to it quickly and he’ll just keep walking. (Good code is a management repellent.)

Next up, an article from Tech Republic’s builder.com.com (is it me or is there one too many .coms in that URL?) on Create graphics on the fly using PHP. The PHP graphics commands have always been daunting to me. Maybe it’s because I have no eye for design. (anyone who has seen my web page can attest to that) Possibly it’s because I am (shall we politely say) not an “A” student in math and graphics takes a lot of math. Either way, I’ve managed to avoid using them on most of my jobs and been able to simply adapt code from others when I absolutely had to.

The article quickly and concisely lays out 2 examples for you. How to create a line chart and a bar chart. Other than making sure that the GD library is installed on your PHP box, there are no other requirements. They make it look so easy, I might start graphing random points myself just for fun.

Both of these articles are necessary for beginners and a great refresher for everyone else. While you are visiting these sites, make sure and drop the authors a note and tell them “thank you” for taking the time to write them. (and tell them Cal sent you.)

Until next time,

=C=