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Antonija Pek
5,819 PointsThis is a comment on this workspaces approach
This is very bad approach to teach noobs some programming.
I think it is better to teach how to set your own programming environment and then slowly teach how to code. You offer some browser environment which is useless for personal usage and nobody develops that way. It is strange how there is so little practice and as a paying customer I don't appreciate not explaining PHP rather linking PHP docs in teachers notes. I can do that for free, there is a reason why people pay you money. Codeacademy is free and they offer practicing code through much nicer interface. For using databases I can do a simple google search as for using frameworks. I wanted to learn from pros how to do thing right, you don't offer that, sorry. This course needs to slow down and include much more practice.
2 Answers
Ted Sumner
Courses Plus Student 17,967 PointsI agree that this is not a beginning course. I suggest stopping and taking the PHP track. You will be well served by doing that. I will suggest that the name be changed so that it is less confusing.
thomascawthorn
22,986 PointsTed Sumner said it! It sounds like everything you're looking for has been created by Treehouse already! You just need to look at what's available. E.g. at the top of the php library, there's two courses on how to set up a local environment.
I have to disagree with "This is very bad approach to teach noobs some programming.". Setting up local environments is hard for beginners - it's probably one of the most discussed questions on the forum. Workspaces skips all of that so you can dive straight into code, which is totally more awesome.
The PHP Track covers things like:
PHP Basics, Set up a local environment on a MAC, Set up a local environment on Windows, PHP & Databases with PDO
I think the name of the course is great - but perhaps some prerequisites could be set.
Anna Kelley
1,355 PointsThe whole point of tracks is to start from a set point of assumed knowledge (in this case a total beginner in php) and to build from there. If there are courses in the library that would make all this clearer, why aren't those courses included as a part of this track?
Antonija Pek
5,819 PointsAntonija Pek
5,819 Points:)
Manish Giri
16,266 PointsManish Giri
16,266 PointsAt this point, I am having the same doubts as the OP. There's a lot to PHP before you dive right into using frameworks. Within a couple of courses, a lot of things have been thrown at us - Composer, Monolog, Autoloading, Slim, Twig, etc. And the worst part is - we're only being shown how to wire everything up using these things. What's the use of using these frameworks in the first place? Why is it a bad idea to not use them? Where are the explanations to these questions?
I don't think you need all these things to get a very basic website up and running, some simple PHP, GET/POST and a DB(MySQLi/PDO) is all that's needed. Instead, I'm now even more confused than ever before, especially with every video teaching something totally new - without explaining it's relevance.
And responding to posts by Ted and Tom, I've been following the PHP track step by step, but all of a sudden, this jump from the basics to frameworks does not make any sense to me.