Studying PHP – Lifelong Learning

In librarianship, the field wherein I developed my professional chops, we liked to, at least theoretically, encourage life long learning. As a post-librarian, I am still pursuing life long learning – specifically, in this post, looking to tackle PHP, its ins and outs, highs and lows, and its documentation to some degree.

• Not quite a PS: I wish I had documented my ongoing study of SQL and MySQL from the beginning, but I don’t have the power to rewind time. That study is continuing as I find the time.

In this post, I want to mention that as I started a course at StackSkills on PHP and Web Administration, which teaches information directly relevant to my day-to-day work, the course teacher talked about installing PHP via XAMPP – a server tool one can run on your local machine (required because PHP is a server-side language).

Technically speaking, ideally, rather, my plan would be to come back to the blog from time to time with an update on something significant in my learning or interesting…or something. But those ideal plans don’t seem to come to fruition. I will eventually be jumping back to a planned, and currently in-progress DRAFT, post on the major tools I am using at my cool new job – so, please be on the lookout.

I will note however, that as I was downloading XAAMP before installation on my MAC, the thought occurred to me that as XAMPP includes a MySQL server – that there would be a conflict because that MAC already has an instance of MySQL running. As soon as the application was installed and operational, I went to start the MySQL server, and, indeed, it would not start.

I went out and found there some work arounds available for this issue that involved changing which ports each instance of MySQL is running on – and was preparing to make some adjustments…

Then I actually started the course, the teacher said that we would not need to interact with MySQL – and that we would only need the Apache Web Server running to work with PHP and the web content used in the course.

I am glad that my intuition about potential MySQL conflicts was a valid thought – but am also glad that I do not need to worry about it at this point – so I can focus on these PHP learning objectives separately from other tools and tricks.

Alright, PHP, let’s get into this…