Today I took the second half of a “Introduction to PHP” class at the Metropolitan New York Library Council, which St. Francis College graciously paid for even though I am not a full-time staff member. The class was taught by Dr. Kwong Bor Ng of the Queens College LIS program. PHP was a component of the information technologies class I took in Fall 2010 at Rutgers, along with JavaScript and MySQL, and this class covered a lot of what I had already learned. However, so much of programming is learning how to write code that does what you want it to do as elegantly and efficiently as possible and everyone has a different approach for how to do that. Dr. Ng explained that the best way to write a function is to just write out what you want it to do in plain English, step-by-step, and then translate that to PHP. This was actually sort of revelatory for me because often you will write a function and then define integral pieces of the function later, so you end up working (and thinking) sort of backwards. I look forward to playing with the test servers he set up, which will be accessible to me (and my fellow students) for the rest of the month.
