Evaluation

To learn a new skill is difficult in it's self, but to learn a new skills on your own is even more difficult. However although I had very little experience of PHP to begin with, I feel it did give me a very slight advantage going into this assignment.

Having a basic idea of the way in which PHP works allowed me to be able to make sense of tutorials and example code more easily which allowed me to pick things up easier and more quickly. One thing I did learn about my self whilst learning PHP is that I learn much better by doing rather than reading a book.

I think this is because I found it difficult to be at a computer screen and follow a tutorial from a book whilst trying to repeat the same process on screen. I also found it much easier to find more exact code examples of what I was trying to learn as apposed to in a book which was obviously a lot more limited than the internet

This became very important during the creation of my website as I found did not work as expected and so I had to find others rather quickly.

I think that this was due to my research skills which is something I need to improve on. For example, in the initial research stage I found a tutorial which allowed a user to login to my database using a hard coded login name and password. This I thought would be fine until I soon realised that it posed both a large security threat but also a rather large impracticality in the sense that only one member would be able to use the site.

For this reason I looked on the same site for a tutorial which pulled users from a database only to spend hours trying to learn/implement the code to find once again the tutorial was incorrect and didn't actually work and so I had to find yet another.

Another example of this was that my login form tutorial also didn't tell me how users could register their details so they were uploaded to the database.

Both these reasons severely set me back in the development stages of my site and could have being avoided easily with a little more thought and thorough research in the initial stages.

On the whole however I feel that my learning of a new skill went very well. I managed to learn all of the skills I set out to learn and more. Some aspects of PHP I learnt I decided not to use (I.e the use of the date function) as I thought it was unneeded and was a case of using it for using it's sake. On reflection however I think that using it in my guestbook would have being a good idea as it could have been used to show what day and time posts were made.

Were I do to this same assignment again I would try and push my self a lot more and try to learn more advanced skills rather than playing it safe which I feel I may have done a little with this assignment.

I think I would also try and think about the security aspects of PHP more too as currently it is something I haven't taken in to consideration much and is obviously quite important.