Tuesday, January 26, 2016

CST 336 Week 4

Week 4

This week we were assigned to read chapters 15 and 16 from Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL, and Apache All in One. The topics covered basic database design and basic SQL statements (SELECT, INSERT, DELETE, etc.). There are three relationships that help relate data in databases: one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. These relationships help us to better maintain our databases. The chapter assigned used students as examples for these. This is very useful information, but I would really appreciate new examples. Relating students to classes and professors is a very tired example in academics. I find that this example topic leaves me bored and disinterested.

We've also began our first team assignment of the semester. Our team has been a little late to the start, but I'm sure we will complete it fine. I'm glad we have settled on an idea and started building out our tables.

Below are my assignments for the week (team assignment should be posted next week):

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

CST 336 Week 3

Week 3

This week we covered HTML forms and PHP arrays. We were assigned the videos from section E of Atomic Learning's HTML5 & CSS3 - Basic Training course, videos from section E of Atomic Learning's PHP Basic Training course. I really enjoy these videos. They're extremely insightful and it's easy to follow along. Coming up with what I will do each time to fulfill the assignment's requirements each time is challenging. However, I am very excited about my assignment this week. Since there's been a lot of hype over the large Powerball winnings, I've created a generator to decide on numbers for your Powerball ticket. It ended up being a lot of fun.

Below are my assignments for the week.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

CST 336 Week 2

Week 2

This week has been focused on creating webpages with PHP. We were assigned reading from the second chapter of Beginning PHP5, Apache, and MySQL Web Development. We were also assigned videos from Atomic Learning's PHP Training course.

For me, this week and last week are basically once since I messed up on the start date for last week. The projects were pretty basic and we've basically been writing the HTML inside of the strings in PHP. This is my first time working with PHP and I am getting a grip on it, but I am still feeling like PHP is pretty messy and it is complicating my HTML. I get the feeling I'll learn a bit more in the upcoming weeks that will help me clean it up. I'm also going to begin looking at various PHP style guides to better understand how companies keep their code base clean and easy to read. So far, the example videos and code snippets don't appear to have much or any code style discipline. Python, which was used in the last course, has a very distinct style guide. It doesn't appear that PHP does.

We began creating some very simple HTML pages with PHP. Below are my assignments for this week.

Friday, January 8, 2016

CST 336 Week 1

Week 1

I'm a bit late on posting this since I thought the assignments for this week weren't already due (they were due the day after the class officially began and I had gone out of the country during the scheduled break), so I'm late on all of my assignments for this week. The week 2 post will follow quickly after this week 1 post. This week we covered several components that can, and often do, make up a website. We were required to read O'Reilly's Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS & HTML5 Chapter 1 Introduction to Dynamic Web Content and follow along through several videos in Atomic Learning's HTML5 & CSS3 - Basic Training videos. Reading through these were pretty simple for me since I already understood these basic concepts. They are really good things to understand and review though, so I read through all of the materials and watched all of the required videos.

We also created some very simple HTML and CSS webpages. One of them was more free form and the other appears to be our home page where we will link all of our assignments from. Below are the webpages I put together for these assignments. Note that the second can be accessed through the first.