Interested asked:


I am looking to find a PHP programmer to help program a website. I advertised in Craig’s list and other places and have a large number of resumes. I am not a computer programmer, and have very little knowledge regarding programming.

What sorts of questions should I ask to help me determine if the people we are interviewing are indeed good PHP programmers?

Thanks!

Ronald Meyer asked:


Learning Programming is a tough subject, no matter which language you choose.

It took me months to figure out php and MySQL enough to build real, quality, Websites that were “good enough”.

Eventually I figured out the easiest way to learn. It took me MONTHS to figure it out… but I did.

So what does it take to learn a Programming Language such as PHP?

“Doing” is what it takes. 90% of the people who try to take on such a task end up feeling “dumb” or “slow”. This usually is NOT the case. I’ve found that, like myself, most people try to learn PHP from reading and going through code to “understand” what it means.

I was the same way until I was told “just do it”. My mentor must have been the most patient man on the face of this earth - because I was constantly telling him I could not do it. But he kept on me telling me the same line I’m telling you: “just do it”.

What does this mean? It means trying to create your very own scripts, whether small or of decent size. Start out with printing out the date to the browser. Continue with Loops. Create scripts that create mathematical equations. Print out your name, last name, etc.

Once you figure out the basics, make sure you continue to learn by doing! You will never be able to take your skills to the next level just by reading.

I also stress to other newbies that they need to learn by watching as well. Writing code can become quite a task and it’s better to see someone else do that, if possible (which it is by watching videos).

It’s quite easy to get caught up in bad practices while writing code if you do not follow good programming standards. Sloppy (spaghetti) code seems to be the evil of the programming world that occurs from newbies who read online tutorials by so called “programmers”. Most of these “programmers” are NOT what they claim to be. So be careful of whom you choose to learn from.

PHP and MySQL (database) go together like peanut butter and jelly. I cannot tell you how important it is to learn these two languages together. MySQL may not be the “best” Database in the world but it is very easy to learn and very capable of building large scale applications.

So remember: if you’re not “doing”, you’re not learning. Start learning PHP basics in solidperformingcontractors.com and make sure you’re following along and trying to code your own small scripts when starting out. I know, I know… it LOOKS like it’s too hard. It’s not. This is not something you’re going to learn overnight, but it’s quite possible that you can learn enough to do what you need to do in just a matter of weeks!

DON COLE F asked:


Learn Website and Webpage Design by Doing It

Just about everywhere you go today you hear about the Internet or something that is related to the Internet. When you go to the store you may see a web address posted, your friends may have their own website, and you may even do your fair share of shopping online. The Internet is the way that a good deal of things get done today and that is because it is quite economical for most people and it’s more convenient. We live in a fast paced world and the Internet allows for us to do things in our own time and even in our own space. The involvement of the Internet in just about everything we do today has left a lot of us wanting to learn more about web design. Website and webpage design is easier than you may have ever thought, which will allow you to build your own websites or even build them for others.

Creating Your Own Internet Presence

Would you like to create your very own personal website? A lot of people are doing this today to keep in touch with family members, to share pictures, and more. If you are interested in doing this you don’t have to pay anyone else to put it all together for you. You can look into PHP learning and create your own website and webpage design. What is PHP? It’s an acronym that is short for hypertext preprocessor. Wondering what that means? Basically, PHP is a server side scripting language that allows for one to make logic driven websites. A lot of what you see on the websites that you visit every day uses PHP such as the contact us form, the image upload tool, and more. Many of the interactive tools that websites offer that make them more fun to use or more convenient are only available through the use of PHP, so it really is a handy to learn this scripting language.

With a big name such as hypertext preprocessor you may be thinking that you cannot learn this stuff on your own, but the fact of the matter is that you can. Just visit the PHP Learn It website and you will have access to a wealth of information, including step by step instructions of how you can implement this technology to create your own website. It’s a process that is best learned by doing, which is how the vast majority of us learn best. Simply set some time aside and before you know it you may have put together your own highly functional website as well as learned some tools that you can market for your own benefit.

PHP Learning Takes Time

A lot of people take on PHP learning and they assume that it will just come natural and within a week they will be professionals. This simply is not the case. PHP is something that most people can learn, especially if you learn through a hands on approach, but it does take time. You may constantly have to play around with different concepts to get things just right. Through a process of trial and error you can become quite good at website and webpage design and the PHP learning process will be well worth it. If you get hung up somewhere along the way, don’t give up, just keep on plugging along, backtracking if you have to, to see where things went wrong.

Using Your New Knowledge to Your Advantage

So, you’ve followed the step by step instructions on how to use PHP and you have created an awesome personal website that allows for you to share pictures and information with friends and family with ease. Now what? Well, you can continue to update and change your website continually to keep friends and family coming back for more and to hone your PHP website and webpage design skills, which will be fun as well as challenging. PHP learning is a process and for a lot of people it becomes somewhat of a personal hobby that they do for themselves.

If you want to do more with your PHP learning, you can. In fact, if you are able to market yourself and your skills well you may be able to look into website and webpage design as a business. The very things that you wanted to create for your personal website you could do to create a business website that will other people to inquire for your website and webpage design skills, and you can charge them for your time and effort! This could be a lot of fun if you enjoy using website and webpage design and you’ll find that it also pays very well if you are creative and willing to try new things and offer designs and abilities that other website and webpage professionals do not offer or are not all that proficient at. There are a lot of people out there today who are willing to pay top dollar for PHP services, so if you enjoy the PHP learning process and you feel that you are adept enough at it, why not make it work for you?

Building On PHP Learning

When you have taken on PHP learning and you have been successful with it, you may have a great looking personal or professional looking webpage, but if you would like to, you can use this as a jumping off point, meaning you can get into bigger and better things. Website and webpage design are really in demand today and if you can use what you have learned in the PHP learning process you can build on that knowledge and offer the biggest and the best that the world of web design has to offer. You can truly make a career of these talents because not everyone is willing to sit down and learn these things on their own, and others just don’t have an interest so they would rather pay people like you! Why not parlay these skills and make them work financially for you in the future? As you can see, PHP learning could ultimately benefit you in more ways than just giving you a great looking Internet space for personal or business use, it could open up a whole new world of opportunities to you.

Don Cole F

Natasa asked:


For years, ASP has been one of the most popular server-side scripting languages and for good reason. It is easy to learn, can be based on either Visual Basic scripting or Java scripting, and it runs on any Windows based server. But therein is the problem. It only runs on Windows based machines. With the growing popularity of UNIX and Apache based web servers, a new open sourced scripting language was needed. Out of this need grew PHP. PHP runs on all of the widely used web servers, including Windows. It also works with most of the common databases, such as MySQL, and can handle ODBC for any other database with an ODBC driver.

With more and more applications being driven to the World Wide Web, server-side scripting languages like PHP make sense. In a server-side scripting language, all of the processing takes place on the server. This means that the developer can create a fully scalable application at the source and have full control over the environment. The user, on the client side, enters data and clicks a button. This sends a request to the server with the form data embedded in the request. The server then takes this request, passes it on to the PHP translator that evaluates and processes the information, then returns simple HTML back to the client.

PHP uses a combination of HTML, scripts and tags to create code that is easy to structure and read. Anyone with knowledge of HTML and a scripting language such as Javascript or VBScript will be up and running in no time. And there is no shortage of places to learn PHP on the Web.

If you need a fast, open-source, easy to learn scripting language for your website, PHP is the way to go.

Peter asked:


You want to only get the first 5 items from an array, but if there only exists less than 5 items in the array, you still want to get them all.

The result would be an array variable containing at most 5 items.
Is there a single PHP function that can do this? (I want to avoid using any loop or if statement)

Many thanks to you all.

Andy Johnson asked:


PHP is the world’s most popular web development language. Started by Danish-Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 it is now installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers and counting.

It is estimated that for every 100 PHP developers, there are 42 Perl developers, 12 Python developers and 4 Ruby developers - PHPs popularity is the central reason why you should consider learning it above all others.

PHP is the basis of Content Management Systems such as Drupal, Joomla and WordPress so gaining a knowledge of PHP would help you in using these scripts.

Presumably your are already proficient with CSS and HTML and want to take your web creativity to another level. If you aren’t, then stop right here. It’s unthinkable to tackle PHP without a firm grounding in HTML and a good knowledge of CSS would be extremely useful.

You don’t have to have a complete knowledge of HTML in order to learn PHP but you certainly need to know the basics - the rest you will pick up in tandem with PHP. For instance, if you use Content Management Systems all the time you’ll unlikely to be that familiar with coding forms, but HTML forms are an essential part of PHP and you’ll need to be able to create them quickly and without fuss.

Learning PHP is as hard as you can imagine it to be. You need time and lots of patience and preferably a reality you need to escape from for an inordinate amount of time. It’s a good idea to pace yourself and set a two year framework in order to become familiar with the core of the language.

Prepare yourself for headaches and frustration and a slow, boring learning curve as it’s on about the same thrill level as a crossword or Sudokus puzzle.

You must be familiar with the multitude of Photoshop net tutorials out there - you know, the ones that engage you with a step-by-step guide and lots of pretty pictures. Well there is nothing comparable in PHP.

It may be unfair to compare photo manipulation software to a programming language, but even the Ruby crew manage to add a bit of bling to their learning process.

Of course, there is satisfaction at creating your first form or web application - to actually create a working item is a tremendous achievement when you are starting out.

So what makes a good PHP programmer? It is the ability to write effective, secure code quickly. Effective means using as little code as possible for the task at hand as well as learning which code is the least wasteful on your server resources (this is technically called refactoring). Secure means that your code is as safe as possible from malicious users and crackers.

To be a quick PHP coder means that you have a thorough knowledge of the syntax and functions as well as library of code which you have created and testing on live websites and that you can bring into new web developments.

You’ll often read a reference to “clean code” amongst PHP heads (and all other code writers for that matter) and above is essentially what they mean by this term.

If you really want to learn PHP though I can guarantee one thing: that you will succeed if you have enough time and are determined enough.

Nobody is born to code PHP - expertise will come about through you applying yourself.

prgrmths asked:


How do I show the difference between two timestamps (which both show the date and time) in php? I have a formula that shows the difference between 2 timestamps, but the format that it shows the difference in is in days/ hours/ minutes/ seconds. I only want one unit to appear. For instance:
If it has been less than a minute between those two dates, I want to return the number of seconds between those dates.

If it’s been less than an hour between the dates, return the number of mintues between the dates.

If less than a day, return the number of hours.

I had more, but if I get those or at least a few of those, I can figure out the rest. Thanks.
I am still accepting solutions. Answer 1 is not acceptable. Please don’t post links unless it is a link to an actual solution.

kolibrizas asked:


I am quite experienced php programmer and I want to earn money for this. Where can I consult people who are starting with php (for example on skype) for money?

Verve Systems asked:


PHP is a open source language which in used in high level scripting, developing dynamic web pages and other web applications.

India is center point of world for PHP programmers because they are efficient enough to provide growing platforms, with the creation of booster websites which increase their site traffic and increase their sales. PHP programmers use open source codes benefit from editing, modifying and updating the source code when there is require. Some programmers with strong basic knowledge and experience of difficulties and benefiting the consumers. In India the pay scale for these programmers are a fraction when compared to other developed countries, which is another reason why India has become the first choice at global market.

PHP and MySQL are very helpful in Content Management System that has become a must for every website to progress properly. When compared to other scripting languages PHP MySQL is preferred by programmers as it is easier to maintain and update. It is accepted as a boon for easy-to program superb web pages.

PHP Development in India has been more of a gift in disguise. With strong domain knowledge and ever-growing PHP programmers, India is a place where most companies would accept challenges with open arms. PHP experts in India have performed commendable jobs in the past. They have managed projects of all sizes and completed difficult task with ease.

PHP acts as a filter, taking input from a file or stream containing text and instructions the outputs for another stream of data. The most common form of the output is HTML. The most popular architecture is the LAMP architecture for deploying web applications. In PHP the P is refer to Python or Perl and it is used as bundle alongside with Linux, Apache and MySQL.

PHP has wide-spread popularity because of the version 4. It is considered as one of the top languages used for server-based scripting. The language is easy to learn. PHP has many arrays and variables which can hold any type of object, where the variables need not be declared, and the syntax is remarkably simple.

Ron McNeil asked:


For those who are unaware of some of the programming languages things like PHP social networking script can seem rather strange, however if you are willing to take the time to really learn about some of the various programming languages you may discover that this is actually one of the best choices available. In the past, the majority of websites were all created using HTML, however in recent years this has rapidly declined as more advanced programming languages were created. PHP is one such example of the new programming languages that is available.

PHP social networking software is quite popular for several reasons. One of the biggest advantages that PHP social networking software has is the ability to be much larger and complex than HTML based programs. For someone who is looking into building a website based around social networking this is important because it allows you to really work at building a site that is large enough as well as stable enough to handle the needs of everyone who may call your website home. PHP social networking script has several ways you can purchase it as well; there are even some versions that are free which can provide you with a very low cost alternative as well.

Looking to find and even build a monster website in the past meant that you would need to have a lot of room for hosting your website, as well as deal with a lot of slow bandwidth issues if your site became very busy. PHP social networking software helps to eliminate some of these problems by providing a much more powerful, versatile and quick loading option that will still do exactly what you need done, without worrying over all of the minor details. However, if you are not able to find a prepackaged version of the PHP networking software you are likely to need someone to script it for you.

PHP is a highly complex language to learn and most people when attempting to learn it become very frustrated with the entire mechanics of the language. Very few who attempt to learn are actually able to build their own site using PHP, yet it provides numerous benefits in terms of what is possible to be done with your site. PHP is one of the best choices that is around in the ability to integrate some of the various components together with other pieces of software to create a completely customized solution. Other programming languages are not always as easy to integrate, however the ultimate decision over which programming language to choose varies greatly.

One of the largest well-known examples of PHP social networking software is Facebook, this is a site that has been scripted and designed largely using PHP as the primary language. MySpace is the largest and one of the most well-known social networking sites and many of the same features can be integrated into a PHP social network software package easily. One of the biggest tasks that you will discover is often choosing which features you are most interested in, this will often determine exactly what software you need to use. Of course while most programming languages can be designed to do what you want; there are some that are much more effective than others at the job. Choosing a program that is able to handle your needs quickly and efficiently is not always easy, but starting with at least determining what you are looking for will allow you to make a very informed decision about whether a PHP social networking software is the best choice for you.

You may be confused and you may not understand PHP at all, but this will not stop your ability to quickly and easily decide upon the best solution for your needs. You may end up discovering that PHP is much too complex for your needs, out of your budget, or plain inappropriate overall. There are plenty of options that you have and looking at a PHP social networking software should be just one of the many options that you explore in your quest to find the solution that is best suited to your needs, rather than the needs of someone else.

Time is ultimately money, deciding what is important to you is a much needed necessity and something that you need to be to be able to do on your own. Exploring PHP social network software may be your ultimate solution, or possibly grossly inappropriate but it is up to you to decide for sure.