Tuesday, November 19, 2002
Yesterday the classroom was frigid. Today, the opposite: stuffily hot. I managed to sneak a mug of water into the classroom and am glad for it. (Signs abound about not bringing in any food. There's a sign at the door saying "The signs asking you not to bring in food or drink are not meant merely as ironic statements"). The extremes in temperature are typical of old warehouse spaces like this.
Today we get into the nitty gritty as to why I'm here -- MySQL. Over the course of the day the instructor goes over the basics of SQL statements, and I copy down notes on the iMac.
Over the course of the morning we proceed to create a table using PHP and MySQL, and a form that creates new tables. It's obvious where we'll be going with this -- tomorrow we'll be populating the databases we have created using PHP forms unless I'm very much mistaken. I can see immediate applications for this as well, which is great.
He also showed a great tool I'd never encountered before phpMyAdmin. It provides a nice little GUI interface to MySQL databases. I can see using that at work once I am up to speed coding databases.
The great thing about this is that while it is aimed "below" what I could take, there are a lot of basic concepts that I've missed, and the course is "putting the pieces together" for me. Unfortunately quite a bit of this material has gone over the heads of some of my colleges in class -- I am familiar with basic programming concepts, an have already worked with PHP and MySQL o some extent, so I tend to be the one in class who responds to answers that seem obvious enough to me, but obviously go sailing over the heads of the others.
I can't help thinking that I could teach a class like this myself. Seeing how the instructor teaches things is useful on that score -- not only in seeing how he approaches the subject, but the types of questions he gets asked, and knowing how I'd approach some topics differently.
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