Thread

Hi all,

I’m new here, and looking forward to get involved in the community.

I’m new to programming, and started to learn PHP, MySql and other thing one month ago. I’ve got the basics now, and can play around with simple classes and applications. I want to develop a project of my own, with the main purpose of learning the language. From what I’ve been reading, I want to learn and use Codeigniter.

One question, for which I didn’t find an answer yet:
Should I learn and practice more PHP before going for a framework?
Or should I start working with a framework right from the beginning of my learning process?

(sorry for the highlight, just want to make sure that the question is seen).
Any tips and advice on how to learn programming (specifically php and codeigniter) are more than welcome.

Thanks for the help,
Jaime

Using a framework will hurt your learning progress if you don’t take the time to understand what the framework is doing in the first place. If you want to use CI, great! But you should take the time to go through its source code, read the comments, look up the functions, and see how it works. You should also already have an understanding of PHP’s basics, such as variables, strings, arrays, concatenation, etc, otherwise even simple things will confuse you.

Learning raw PHP will help you understand the language, but will give you a very rough application. Using CI will give you a better footprint for building an app, but it will introduce more questions than it will answer as you go. I always found it easy to learn from other people’s code, so pick CI apart and learn.