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If you’ve been a frequent reader of this blog for some time, you know by now that I started a project, which basically is writing a book about PHP. It’s a book meant towards the absolute beginners who want to learn PHP, and I’ve made a commitment to make it as easy to understand as it can be done.
I started this project due to two reasons, the first reason because of personal reasons, some years ago when I was learning PHP I found some parts hard to understand. This was usually the tutorial or book writers that assumed too much, they explained something very briefly or sometimes they didn’t at all. This left me in a position where I didn’t really know why it worked or how it worked. Sure as time went by and you read some more and got some more experience things finally started to make sense. Today I can laugh about it, how didn’t I get that back then? Most things are obvious why they work, and sometimes when trying to explain something to a friend I too assume that everyone knows why this works or how it works. But some don’t, and this is my second reason.
Several friends of mine while learning PHP got stuck on things I thought were obvious and that everyone knew. I don’t know if this has to do with the fact that you have been coding for so long time that various aspects you had problems with in the beginning aren’t any hassle today, it’s just how they work, and that’s why this happens. You don’t really realize that this can be difficult to understand by someone that is new to the topic.

It’s like basic math; you assume that everybody knows why you get that result, and how it works. But as I’ve seen with programming people have problems with the “obvious” things, of course not all people but there are still those who are experiencing it.
Over the years I’ve also discovered that there are two types of programmers, those who didn’t care much about the problems, they just learnt the way to handle the problem and are doing it, as learning a poem by hart and repeating it without any problems, it’s the same thing for these people when they encounter different problems, they learnt a way to solve it not necessarily knowing why or how it works, and just apply it whenever they need.
Then you have the programmers that want to know how things work, they want to understand and not use something they don’t understand, these are the type of people I think everyone should aim to become. As you need to have a strong foundation from where to start, not only in programming, this can be applied to most things in life. From there you can build a strong “project” as you have a rock solid base to work from. If you don’t well then you have the risk that what you build on a faulty foundation covered with cracks will become broken and unsafe.
That’s like the most important reason I see to learn and understand the aspects of a programming language, so you can have that solid foundation and not the broken one, and this is why I decided to write the book.
But while writing it, I’ve come across moments when I see that I make some mistakes that I said most of the PHP book writers do, thinking different things are obvious to the reader, thankfully I have two readers, one that have been coding for over a year now and another that is completely knew to PHP to put me back down on earth, and telling me when I make those mistakes.
And I have to say that in the beginning I thought writing something like this would be a piece of cake, surprise! , it wasn’t I found myself doing the same mistakes from time to time.
This was meant to be a small post, but as you can see by now it became quite a long post so I won’t ramble on with my thoughts about this project, as the above is enough in my opinion.

Now if you’re interested in helping me read the chapters I write and be a part of the project feel free to contact me and I’ll include you in the “beta testers” group. Of course you’ll get you name and site address published in the credits section when the book is released.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 6:00 am and is filed under Personal, projects. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.