I have previously complained about how badly most tutorials are written. But can I take my own advice? I know some really smart people who have never actually coded but find they would like to do so— how would I advise them to get started?

Draft Outline for what I consider a “Good Tutorial”

• Start with a clear purpose statement for the tutorial — why would one want to take it?
• Identify the absolute minimum prerequisites, provide a link to a super-simple tutorial on those subjects.
• Do a quick check that things are set up.
• List and clearly state a short list of key principles or _conceptual distinctions _that one needs to understand to produce something useful, with a link to the page in the official manual with more details.
• Include the simplest possible examples of code — free from dependencies or extraneous styling.
• Provide a “problem set” in order to learn by doing.
• Keep the tutorial open for comments and improvements! So — please let me know if this one could be better.

Purpose of THIS tutorial

• To provide bright beginners the basic knowledge to create their first dynamic web applications in PHP (Part 1), how to get pages to communicate with each other (Part 2) and how to get your pages to carry out database queries (Part 3).
• To focus on one, simple way to code. Even in PHP there are LOTS of ways to do things. There are entirely different paradigms of coding that you’ve probably heard people argue about. This tutorial uses the “Procedural” and “Functional” paradigms because I think they are simpler to learn — as distinct from the OOP: the Object-Oriented paradigm. You’ll see a bit of OOP when we refer to databases.

#tutorial #php #codingbootcamp