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My readers may or may not know that I run a web development company, CreateSean, where I build web sites using ExpressionEngine and MojoMotor. For the past two and half years this has been something I do on the side while I teach full time at a university here in Seoul.
Now that there is only just over 5 months until I move to Canada I’m starting to feel the pressure of finding employment. My business makes me some money but not enough to live on for a family of four. Recently I started watching craigslist jobs in web development for Toronto and most of them require a working knowledge of PHP which I do not have. I have tried a couple of times to learn from a book or web site but it didn’t work for me. I think for PHP I need to take a course in a classroom and am now looking for somewhere to do that in the GTA once I arrive.
At first I thought I’d audit a course at the University of Toronto, but couldn’t find one nor information on whether auditing courses is available or not. I then did some googling and found a number of classes that can be taken online with an instructor or in person. The online ones are cheaper, but not viable for me here in Korea due to the need to be online in the middle of the night – may do this option once in Toronto thought. The courses all seem to be from 2-5 days in length (6-7 hours each day) with costs ranging from $700 upto $2500
I’m more concerned about the quality of the course than whether I get some sort of certificate (though that might be useful too). The thing is anyone can make a web site and add testimonials that are attributed to past students/clients even if they don’t exist. So the question is how to ensure that the course I take is quality. I’m also interested in taking a second course in intermediate/advanced php/mysql once I’ve completed the introductory level course.
I did contact the Software Training Academy listed above as they offered an option to proceed at your own pace with asynchronous instructor feedback. However the email I sent from their contact form bounced back to me which does not exactly inspire confidence.
If anyone has recommendations on a course to take either online or in person in Toronto (preferred) please let me know.
Comments(1)
Dave: Thursday Feb 3, 2011 at 01:00 AM
I still believe “just doing it” is the best way to go about learning PHP. Check out one or two getting started tutorials that explain to you how to use echo, for, while, if, ifelse and else, think of something you’d like to build, and with php.net open on the side (there is not a single service, platform, language or product that has better descriptions and user comments than PHP. Seriously.) and off you go. Don’t pick a difficult thing to start with, of course. Don’t go out and make your “expression engine killer”, or something MVC-based. Something small, but fun, and slightly elaborate.
The first thing I built was a compatibility list for a Playstation emulator for Pocket PC’s (oh the days..). Users could sign up (user registration, check), post games (posting & user verification, check), mark them as compatible yes/no/kinda (if/elseif/else-based style changes to the item’s view, check) add comments to existing posts (commenting, aka threading, check) and attach screenshots for funfies or to further explain a possible bug (file uploading, check!). There was also an admin panel (administrative user priveleges, check!) that could delete or edit entries and kick users (IP-based user checks, check). All of this was backed by a bunch of text files representing the database (I know, right?).
It wasn’t really future-proof, safe or, well.. good. But it worked. And I learned a lot from it, a lot more than I would’ve learned from books, where I’d forcefully have to try to butt-kick my way through painfully boring examples and other crappy (and often incorrect) explanations, accompanied by black&white; screenshots taken on a Windows 98 box.
I might have exaggerated a little bit at the end there.
Go for it!