The Only Useful Book

Out of the 6 books I picked up at the library I've really only been using one: SAMS Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache. I don't have a computer to work on right now, so sadly I haven't actually been able to teach myself any of these, but I have learned alot about them and about how websites work these days.

Prior to picking up this book, I knew that PHP was used for coding webpages but didn't really know why it was special, and had heard the words MySQL and Apache tossed around but didn't know anything about them. Also, I sort of knew what a database and server were, but didn't really know much about them.

Here's what I've learned. PHP works within HTML and doesn't directly code for webpages so much as it gets the server to spit out an HTML webpage for you. It can be used to design websites, web applications, and is especially good at communicating with servers and databases. MySQL is used to setup and manage databases, which are basicaly just tables used as vehicles for information. Unlike other popular coding languages which are object oriented, PHP is procedural, so functionality with a database sort of acts as a surrogate to the role played by classes in OOP languages (I think). Apache is just the server and well, I don't know how much I can learn about that without playing with it directly.

PHP looks alot like stuff I've worked with before, so it's scary and new but not super intimidating because it still looks familiar and somewhat intuitive. I'm going to need to learn what variables and functions are already built into the program. MySQL is much scarier. I've never worked with a database before. I've manipulated information in tables using excel before, but this is way different.

Why did I abandon Ruby on Rails but get so interested in PHP and MySQL? Drupal is programmed in PHP, and I think it's the CMS I'm going to stick with. I'm anticipating needing to do at least some tweaking to get it to do what I want, so I'm definitely going to want PHP for that. PHP and MySQL interface well together, and it's likely that where I see PHP code in the files I'll want to adjust, I'll also see embedded MySQL commands.

Hopefully I'll be able to glean all the functionality I need out of Drumla without needing to code anything, but may as well learn a little anyway. But Drumla works in modules, and I really doubt what I want already exists. MySQL still scares me.