Let The Good Times Roll

Having left college in may I found myself thinking what I would do to keep myself active during the time I had free? Unfortunately I found myself not having one day of rest apart from the weekends. During the holidays I took a role at the design mechanics for one month before I was offered a website design position at go2you.co.uk now trading under the Pawprintsigns.

The whole three months have go so quickly I have not even had much time to think and gather everything I will need for the start of the new year at Wakefield College. Being back was a sign of relief but now that I have a working job at the same time I think I need to pay more attention on home to manage my time more efficient and make sure that the work I do at college doesn’t fall low because of lack of effort.

I can say It is good to be back at college and back learning what I love and this year I hope will be better than the last and I will gain more out of it. The projects that we have been set will determine how the year goes especially the Self Managed Learning Plan (SMLP), which is where I will have to develop a specific subject alone and manage everything.

Well now I have outlined in brief what I have been doing over the last three months and the first week back at Wakefield College lets see what the year holds for me.

PHP and MYSQL - Including CMS Resources

I have been looking around now for a while to find some good and easy reading books. Having asked around and some developers I know below is a list of resources;

Web Based tutorials and information sites

www.php.net
www.mysql.net
www.tizag.com
www.good-tutorials.com

Paperbased Materials

PHP & MYSQL for Dummies 2nd Edition
Teach Yourself MYSQL in 24 Hours
PHP and MySQL Web Development (4th Edition)
Pro Zend Framework CMS: Building a Full CMS Using Advanced Aspects of the Zend Framework
Head First PHP & MySQL

There will some more additions to this list so please keep ahving a look at what I will be using to complete the SMLP.

SMLP: PHP and MYSQL

Having been in the design industry for quite some time I feel that it is a must to be able to create dynamic and interactive websites and database driven sites. From what I know and have seen, the demand for this kind of skill set is highly demanded from growing and already established companies.

Knowing that I have to undertake a self managed learning program and that I am more than capable in the design and development areas, I think I would like to increase my development skill set by learning how dynamic and database driven websites are created.

For this I have researched different kinds of content management systems including Wordpress and Joomla and have realised that PHP and MYSQL are the main scripting/programming language and database application that are used to make these programs run.

Over the last two month my aspects and role has changed dramatically because not only do I only need to know the fundamentals of how computer languages work but I also need to know what kind of media and file type different programs have to be in.
Being confident of what I already know about the design industry and how things work and what is required I think PHP and MYSQL would be the best option to study for my 8 weeks of the SLMP.

After looking at the current job opportunities on the internet I think that by knowing these skills would increase the chance of landing a development role in the industry and getting a better paid salary.

My goal from the SMLP is to have enough knowledge about PHP and MYSQL to design and create my own custom content management system. By doing this I will be looking at different online and paper based resources to help me along with the learning process.