PHP – NONCODERS – Introduction

In my process of learning how to skin Wordpress I have started to learn PHP. This is a series of post that will explain what I stumbled over as a non-coder so you don’t have to.

A bit about me.

When I look at my experience with code I can say I went about it all-wrong.  My first mistake is that I never took a class in code, code theory, or computer technology. In truth I am illustrator who loves to interact with my audience.  Where I did go right was I have always interacted with computers, my parents taught me how to think, and learned to love math problems. I have always had computers in my life because first coding book was “Weird Computer Games” for the Commodore 64, I was 7. I have learned to think because one of my moms favorite pass times was challenging me with logic puzzles, they were MENSA level. And my love of math came to be true when I was doing my sisters Algebra and Geometry home work, she was three years older then I was and I had never taken an algebra class yet.

So now I am an Art Director and the Technical Director  for Merrick Towle Communications and I have been doing my best to master things I have never touched and then teach others how to deal with these languages that now live breath and influence everything you see in the web.

I have gotten good at speaking laymen because of clients, and co-workers who need answers, or quick knowledge about how to use language.

My learning style:

I have three ways of learning. I buy books which gloss over the basics or that key to making it clear why we do things one way vs another.  The tubes are a great reference, youTube, blogs, help documents, and forums have lots of info. And some of the info you find there, if you understand it, can get you very far. The last is trial and error, we all do it I have been getting less error the longer I do it, but I still do the trial every time I do something new. So I hope I can take a little bit of all of my experience and help you understand in simple terms what you don’t know already.

The code that is called PHP (first known as Personal Home Page)

PHP is the language you might use the most because it is open source, simple(for code) and it is free. If you ever thought about doing content management on your personal site you will be using something like wordpress, jumla, or drupal and they all use php.  Thank god you really don’t need to know how they work, and that they have some great documentation.  So I am here just to explain to you how you can edit templates and pull off some cool tricks with some easy basic knowledge of the language and structure. It is like to you are going to Spain for two days it would be better if you were fluent but it is not needed.