Is it confusing that I am counting from 0 on the days but 1 on the week? Yes, yes, it is, but I am making a decision to go for clarity rather than consistency here. After all, a whole week zero sounds kind of different than day zero right?
Well that kind of style choice (often with 2 okay answers but neither appearing truly optimal) often presents itself in writing code. We’ve been writing code now for almost three weeks, and in that short time we have covered a massive range of topics including http, HTML, CSS, jQuery, Bootstrap, LESS, ERD, SQL and now this week PHP.
At the end of last week we took our first of four belt exams–this one the “yellow belt” covering HTML and CSS. After some more PHP and mySQL we will be taking the “red belt” test on those subjects [and the LAMP stack, generally speaking]. As we have started with procedural PHP, we have yet to cover the MVC-framework style of PHP coding, which I am looking forward to.
I have some experience with PHP but given the diversity of approaches used with that language, I am learning a great deal even in the current procedural programming section–and I have even less experience with frameworks. The sections coming up should be both challenging and enligtening–once we get a feel for MVC with PHP, we will move on to the material in the second half of this Coding Dojo class. This material includes the new and exciting (and very challenging according to the people I’ve discussed it with among the cohort of students ahead of mine) MEAN [MongoDB ExpressJS AngularJS NodeJS] stack. After that will be Ruby on Rails, but at this point I’m getting pretty far ahead as I have a lot of PHP work to do at the moment.