PHP to You!

It's now Fall, 2009, and I've begun a new online class at Foothill: PHY & MySQL. I noticed that the information Foothill stores (that other students see) includes a link to this blog, so I guess I'd better put up something new!

I'm excited about taking this class for many reasons, but mainly because I hope it will help me address some photo display and storage problems!! In particular, I wonder - how do you keep track of it all? How do you quickly, painlessly (dream on!) post new pictures?

I invite interested students/viewers to join me in online discussions of this class, especially as regards their experience of it. What interests YOU? What have you learned? What's PHP good for? What do you do with MySQL?

My task for today is to download the software and install it. I've been confused about what to install, and how. WAMP and XAMPP are availibe for a bundled approach, and one can individually download the required software (PHP, MySQL, and Apache) and install them manually. What to do? The teacher says it's our choice - but evaluating options and choosing only one has NEVER been my strong suit! I could study the choices for the entire quarter before I felt ready to "decide". Sigh. Guess I'll just plunge right in - I've chosen XAMPP because - it's "prettier". It has more of a visual appeal, and since I'll be looking at it a lot, that probably matters to me the most (meaning, I have no other basis on which to choose).

One other caveat - I want to do my editing with Dreamweaver, and I found this article interesting (& helpful): Setting Up a PHP Development Environment on Dreamweaver. Another reference I'll be using this quarter: PHP for Dreamweaver 8, by David Powers. He, of course, strongly suggests we do a manual installation. Finally, there is the class text-book: PHP, MySQL, and Apache, by Julie C. Meloni (a Sam's "Teaach Yourself" All in One book). The text-book includes an installation disk with everything on it, but apparently that's not the recommended way to install the software...

Ah well, enough delay - here I go! Off on another online adventure...