Stuck with a cold that won’t go away, I threw myself headlong in to my Sams Teach Yourself PHP4 book having previously only toyed with a few minor pieces of code. The result of the last six days worth of slogging is that my daily caffeine intake has increased massively and my sleeping pattern has skewed towards falling asleep close to dawn. Oh, and the words section now being served from a mysql database.
After a few days of reading and doing the lessons I was building the database and writing code to interact with it. I almost jumped out of my skin as everything started to work together. There was a lot of stress and frustration when things didn’t want to work correctly, and my brain cells stretched further than they have for quite some time to try and figure out the correct queries to extract my data.
There’s still some work to do. The code is scatty, the admin is unattractive and not efficient enough, and as I progressed with the project my “to do” list became an “ideas” list. But it seems to work (let me know if it breaks down on you).
Along with the book, I hit these a lot:
www.php.net/manual/en – PHP manual’s search
www.mysql.com/documentation – mysql documentation
www.phpbuilder.com – the search facility and comments from people
www.google.co.uk – when the other searches didn’t help
w3.one.net/~jhoffman/sqltut.htm – introduction to Structured Query Language