Re: FN-FORUM: Includes PHP question

date posted 25th January 2008 18:58

John Deaville wrote:
>
>
> Hello again - I am the original poster

Hi John
> Carrie, You donšt sound very sorry ...

well hopefully a fuller answer will demonstrate that I was not trying to
score points off you, just being a little flippant whilst making a
valid suggestion.
IMHO you can't learn programming from video tutorials from the web.

> For reference, I am a photo retoucher, freelance, hence that is why I joined
> the site.
>
> Because I work in photography, I have created some portfolio sites in flash
> for the people I work for, with reasonable success in that specific niche -
> however webdesign as a whole up to now makes up only a small percentage of
> my income, so investing a huge amount of time reading books for what could
> turn out to be a limited return, did not make much sense. Although I do
> periodically do a bit of research online when I am not busy.
>
I find that there is a huge gap between tutorials you can find online
for "simple" stuff, and tutorials for "hard" stuff.
I haven't found many tutorials/sites that will wizz you through the
basics AND give enough understanding of the underlying principles.

> I have bought lots of books - frankly I get to page 20 and give up because
> they are impossible to follow, if you are starting from scratch - stuff like
> lynda.com gives you a founding so at least you can understand what the books
> mean, but hey maybe I am ignorant and just donšt understand the written word
>
Seriously I would always buy a book to cover the basics, it may seem
difficult to follow at first, I have always referred to learning a new
language as a vertical learning curve. In my case I have been learning
new languages sine 1986 (or earlier if you include basic).
I usually find that you have to read and understand at least the first
three chapters of a good primer before it will start to make sense on a
wider scale, unless it was a very short book perhaps you gave up a bit
early.

> I looked into the PHP Includes - and I think it is a reasonable question -
> google does not spider the css which you use to format your pages (or maybe
> it does) - and I thought that was the reason for using css, so that the info
> on your page was just the most relevant text and links, and I wondered if
> the same applied.
>
> And now I know it doesnšt
>

Good, without trying to sound patronising, do you now understand the
difference between client side and server side technologies?
This is where your confusion has arisen.

Sadly, and although I have sometimes tried, most recently with CSS,
learning a whole new skill set is not possible using "just" web tutorials.

Though I am sure that Tony could come up with a list to prove me wrong.
He did help me a lot with links but they were most useful once I had
really go the hang of the basics - for which I used two books, a basic
primer and an advanced book.

I spent about 6 weeks swearing at the screen trying to place images and
boxes and stuff why won't this centre? why has that box moved down? why
won't this line up with that etc etc etc.

> Thank you, and I apologise for my 'ignorance'
don't apologise, I am very ignorant about photo re-touching.
and I suspect that a basic primer wouldn't help me much with that either.

So Sorry.

Carrie