Thread

As my title says; For how long have you been working with PHP? I’m just curious. 😊

—For myself I think it’s about.. 3 or 4 years, but I’ve been doing websites since I was 12 years old (I’m 18 years old at the moment). PHP was really, really hard for me to understand in the beginning, but at least not anymore.. of course there’s stuff that I’d like to know more about (arrays, caching e.g) You might aswell drop of some links to helpful PHP tutorials if you feel like. 😊 Though I love PHP and feel I can do alot (I started working with CodeIgniter few months ago and I didn’t know anything about OOP and MVC back then… I hard-coded everything myself) I feel I’m not able to think creative when it comes to my applications. I mean, most of the time I look through a lot of open source codes (like the auth libraries) just to get a overview. Whenever I see someone asking a “tough” question, there’s someone who comes with a really nice answer and I think to myself: “Wow, why didn’t I figure that out?” Can I do something about it? I just want to be a lot more better to think creative and make better, safe and lightweight applications. How long did it take you to “figure most of the things out”? I know there’s a lot of stuff to learn everyday and you can’t get to know everything about PHP, however. 😊 Maybe it’s because I’m danish and english isn’t my native language so it takes a little be longer for me to understand the whole process, but hey.. the creator of PHP was danish, so if he can do it, I can do it. 😛

Maybe I should just try plugging my internet cable out and TRY to do it by myself… at least sit with it for some hours and then ask help if I’m stuck. It’s just the “hm, let me think, how can I code this and how would it be safe and simple”-part, ha ha. 😛

You know… K.I.S.S 😉

I hope some of you have some good answers and a few good tutorials.. at least I just want to hear for how long you’ve been working with this stuff.

11 years!

That’s pretty… long 😛

I first started out with PHP about 5 years, but it made very little sense to me back then (it was mostly generated via dreamweaver with a few tweaks from me)
I’ve now beeing doing ‘real’ programming for 3 years with PHP, Java and C#

I first learnt OP thanks to Java at Uni, which helped a lot with my PHP as it was all procedural before that

As for the learning ‘clever ways to do things’... I know its not the answer you want, but you just learn it with time…
I think I picked up all these clever ways to do things because I was always around other programmers (at uni and work) and we always looked at each other code… I got ideas how to improve mine from theirs and vice versa, so hare your code, get feedback from the community and never give up 😊

Ye, I guess I’ll just have to show my applications and get some constructive feedback, you got it! 😊 Thanks!

god I feel old, the first program I wrote was on a commodore 64, some 24 years ago. Been doing PHP for at least 9 years now.

well, 5 years+

I’ve had a commodore 64 too 😛

Now you’re making me feel young… the oldest hardware I had was a P1… and that was cutting edge 😊

I still remember some of the games I’ve played on that machine and actually some of them was pertty good. I got it from my mothers.. something.. haha and I loved it. Old school, for the win. 😊

A little over 3 years I think. Never been head-first into programming though. I do mostly design.

Almost 3 years now 😊

If you want to get better, you need to read some books. You have to grasp the benefits of design patterns like modularity, encapsulation, single responsibility and the like. Basically get familiar with the concepts behind Object Oriented Programming. There are a lot of good blogs and resources you can find about this all over the internet. For starters you can try this blog I recently found or take a look at the IBM website

There are a couple of books that will make you a better programmer in general. The examples might not be in PHP but learning another language (either PHP-like or something completely different) only advances your skills in PHP since it will make you see how different languages (thus people) solve different problems.

If you are serious about becoming a better programmer in general, I would advice you to at least read these books:
Code Complete 2
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

I started out with design, but I wanted to be able to do both things and now I can - it’s so nice and I don’t have to hire a programmer for my websites.

——

Thanks a lot, n0xie. 😊

about 7-8 years… scary.

But like everyone else it’s never a case of programming in just one language…

Oh and I also had C64 (with a 1541), and a VIC20 before that 😛

The guys that also owned commodores; are you now Apple users? - I find this is a trend

Commodore->Nintendo->Apple

Spectrum->Sega->PC