The Daily Programmer

On my quest to learn how to program I picked up this little gem of a book. " PHP & MySQL for Dummies ", by Janet Valade. It took me about 2.5 years to get through the whole book.  There would be days and weeks that I would take it home read it and work on the examples.  There were also months where I didn't touch the book at.  I would forget the majority of what I learn and would have to start over. Naturally this got frustrating so one evening I came up with a plan to read and work on the examples for one hour a day.  My goal was two months to finish the book but it ended up being 3. Nevertheless I was able to finish the entire book.  As I look over the body of work I create I was happy to see that I made a lot of progress.  There were 5 different projects and each one was different.  Learning PHP opened my eyes to how much work and detail goes into a website. The next challenge is learning how to program in PHP as a Object Oriented Prog...

I just looked back at an old blog post from 2012 and it turns out that it was about Java Programming.  Recently I picked Java back up.  Over the past 2.5 years I have been working with Python, PHP, and SQL.  From a web stand point those languages have served me very well.  The point I have been missing with programming with those languages has been OOP.  Object Oriented Programming. Learning how to code via OOP opens up so many avenues.  Don't get me wrong Python and PHP are both procedural and OOP language.  The difference with Java is that it is exclusively OOP.  That means that every piece of the program is written in a class. 'Methods' or I liked to think of them as 'Functions' are coded in a way that is reusable.  There have been plenty of times I would work on a website and end up copying code from one page to another.  That's lame... Two pieces of advice that I started taking for myself has been to sign up for a class on li...