PHP

Roger Cheng

Codecademy PHP notes

elephpant

I just zipped through the PHP course in the Codecademy “Language Skills” section.

As is typical of beginner-friendly Codecademy language skill courses, it starts from the beginning with variables, flow control, etc. If the student is already aware of such basic concepts, this can get very tiresome.

This PHP class flew through basic topics. This is great for experienced programmers already familiar with the concepts and just wanted to see how PHP differs from the other languages. The downside is that, if a student is truly a beginner, they wouldn’t have received much help and would probably be lost.

I thought the class would get into more difficult topics, or areas specific to PHP and web development and… it didn’t. After covering the basics of declaring classes and class inheritance, the class stops. Even though the introduction mentioned that PHP web apps can contact databases and other server-side resources, this class didn’t cover any of the meat-and-potato of writing web applications with PHP.

Overall, the class is a superficial skimming of the surface for PHP. Good for somebody who just wants to see a quick view of PHP basics, and I appreciated it for that, but bad for somebody who actually wants to figure out how to do useful things with PHP.

I’ll have to look elsewhere for that.

Loopiness

Unrelated to the skimpy curriculum is a problem with the interactive learning development environment. In other Codecademy courses, the student writes the code and presses a button for it to be executed and evaluated. In this class, evaluation is constantly happening before the button is pressed. The upside is that feedback for errors are instant, no waiting until the end. The downside is that it’s easy to make it go into an infinite loop.

Example: If this was the goal:

$abc = 1;

while ($abc < 10)

Just before we type “<10” the state would be:

$abc = 1;

while ($abc)

Which is an infinite loop that sends the evaluation code spinning uselessly. So when the student actually presses the button later, the gear just spins.

Workaround: copy the newly-typed code into the clipboard, hit refresh on the browser to reset and reload the page, then paste the code in.

Roger Cheng

Minor Derailment Due To Infrastructure

One of the reasons I put Node.js education on hold and started with Ruby on Rails is because of my existing account at Dreamhost. Their least expensive shared hosting plan does not support Node.js applications. It does support Ruby on Rails, PHP, and a few others, so I started learning about Ruby on Rails instead.

The officially supported version of Ruby (and associated Ruby on Rails) is very old, but their customer support wiki assured me it could be updated via RVM. However, it wasn’t until I paid money and got into the control panel did I learn RVM is not supported on their shared hosting plan.

RVM Requires VPS

At this point I feel like the victim of a bait-and-switch…

So if I want to work with a non-ancient version of Ruby on Rails (and I do) I must upgrade to a different plan. Their dedicated server option is out of the question due to expense, so it’s a choice between their managed Virtual Private Server option or a raw virtual machine via DreamCompute.

In either case, I didn’t need to pause my study of Node.js because it’d work on these more expensive plans. Still, Ruby is a much more pleasant language than JavaScript. And Rails is a much better integrated stack than the free-wheeling Node.js. So it wasn’t all loss.

Before I plunk down more money, though, I think I should look into PHP. It was one of the alternatives to Ruby when I learned NodeJS wasn’t supported on Dreamhost shared hosting. It is the server-side technology available to Dreamhost shared hosting, fully managed and kept up to date. Or at least I think it is! Maybe I’ll learn differently as I get into it… again.

Dreamhost offers a 97-day satisfaction guarantee. I can probably use that to get off of shared hosting and move on to VPS. It’s also a chance find out if their customer service department is any good.

UPDATE 1: Dreamhost allowed me to cancel my hosting plan and refunded my money, zero fuss. Two clicks on the web control panel (plus two more to confirm) and the refund was done. This is pretty fantastic.

UPDATE 2: I found Heroku, a PaaS service that caters to developers working in Rails and other related web technologies. (It started with Ruby on Rails then expanded from there.) For trial and experimentation purposes, there is a free tier of Heroku I can use, and I shall.