May 14th 2002, 20:46 GMT

I’ve finally done it. I’ve finally gotten off my duff and started teaching myself PHP. I bought a book on it several months ago, but hadn’t actually started using it until last night.

I think I just needed some motivation, in the form of a good starter project. Something more complex than spitting out “Hello World” or regurgitaing form input back at the user.

A friend of mine has this idea for her website which appears to be perfectly suited for PHP. It also has the added advantage of not being too terribly difficult to code, (I think,) and has room for some enhancements down the road.

I also have some ideas for more extensive PHP based projects for work – but those are a bit ambitious for me to tackle just yet. I need to learn what I’m doing first.

Anyway – I have a question for you other web developer types: Are there any PHP books you’d recommend? Also, since I plan to segue into more complex database driven web applictions at some point, (for the projects at work,) are there any MySQL books or resources I should look into?

(Gah. Has it really been a month since I wrote anything?)