Day 15: Connecting PHP to MySQL

Today's morning lecture was a demonstration on how to write these PHP programs efficiently. Michael really emphasizes writing up the HTML and making it look like the desired output before starting anything else. This may be opposite of what many developers do. I know when I was doing Rails tutorials, I was taught to think about models and how they connect to the database before I even write a line of HTML. There really are benefits either way but I really do see the benefit of the way Coding Dojo teaches it. There is a reason why we start with wireframes. Also clients and designers may change their minds about how things look and if we can agree on that, we're in a pretty good spot before we make hefty changes to the back-end.


Today we added on top of our original understanding of PHP and validations but now we were adding a database to work with.

Here is a snapshot of my MySQL workbench where I have data.

And once again the usual registration and login page.

Today was the first day I truly begun to feel "powerful". I have the ability to create a web page that users can submit forms store user input into databases and output data on a profile page. I even started daydreaming of being Mark Zuckerberg's character in The Social Network when he first started coding Facebook.

Speaking of Facebook, our next assignment is to create a facebook-like application where users have a profile where you can make posts and others can comment on the posts.

This is really really exciting. I'm only a 1/4 of the way done. I can't stop coding!



What I love about this bootcamp is the pace at which we learn. The gas pedal is always hitting the floor. There are some students that are falling behind and aren't picking up the concepts as quick as others but there are always TAs available if they need it.