Catching up for the week.

I have been really busy over the last week, so I have not had a chance to post here until now.

Work is going great! I am settling in and I am making good progress and learning a lot. I would like to say I have been making the same progress with my HTML studies, but just haven't had time to sit down with the Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML book lately. I am hoping get in so study time over this weekend. Even though I have a job, I still want to develop and improve my skill set, and I definitely need to clean up my web sites. I also will continue to develop my interest in web accessibility.

I am going to drop the Apache, PHP, and MySQL studies for now, and start up with C# shortly. Studying C# will not only help me at work, but also may be beneficial with my robotics work using Microsoft Robotics Studio (MRS) from what I have been told. I will be using the Lego NXT system to start with because it can be used with MRS and it's easy to work with.

Given that it's now "that season" in the Seattle (cloudy, rainy, dreary) I'll be taking my astonomy interest inside and play with some of the free astronomy programs that come with Ubuntu as well as working with the Astro Link Blog and the Cloudymidnights Blog. I'll also be playing around with my CoCo, though I'll be posting more about that on the 8-Bit Retro Computing Blog.

I think I'll be busy for quite some time. Cheers! :)

I am still here and still plugging away.

I have been very busy the last few days working on my job search, so much so that I have had to put the books down for a bit and just crank away at the job search.

I have made enough headway and have gotten organized enough to where my schedule will allow for more study time starting today (or at least I hope)

While my goals and purpose haven't changed, I do need to meet the requirements as required by the Employment Security Department, and so I have to balance my energies and priorities.

I have taken some time to gloss over Chapter Five of Head First book, and the perused the Crash Course book a bit, and once I clear a few things off my plate I am back to work at reading those two books.

The one thing that I am trying not to do is get down too hard on myself about the situation, and I am working hard at staying positive. I will say though I am putting in a lot of walks to help with the stress and keep me motivated.

That's it for now, and thanks for reading. Please feel free to comment. It would be nice to know that someone is reading this blog.

Cheers! ~ Jim

Some more progress, and more books for sale.

I got going with Chapter 3 of the the Head First book about a half hour ago, and I realized that if I dove in too deep it wouldn't be until the wee hours of the evening before I got to sleep, so I am winding down for the night. It looks like tomorrow is going to be a fun day though.

I finished a short chapter in the MySQL book. It primarily dealt with permissions which given my set up will not be that important (yet). Speaking of MySQL, I found this article on Linux.com:

Protecting your MySQL database from SQL injection attacks with GreenSQL

Maybe it will be of interest to some of the readers of this blog.

I also went through my piles of books and pulled some of the older Linux books out and listed them on the Books For Sale page. Hopefully someone will buy some of the books. I need the space and the extra cash wouldn't hurt either.

Course change feels right.

I finished the first chapter of Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, and feel pretty good about the progress. A lot of what was covered I already had a handle on it, but the style of the book helped reinforce what I knew and going through the exercises definitely reinforced my knowledge.

My "Starbuzz Coffee" pages are looking good (You'll only understand if you have read the book)

I received a good tip from one of my Linkedin connections for a new GUI Admin Tool for MySQL. You can find it here: http://www.mysql.com/products/tools/administrator/ (thanks Marko)

I think the new course is the right one, and with determination and a little luck I will be moving forward with my career and job search.

Making progress and a slight course change.

The weekend Apache/MySQL/PHP crash course is turning into a week long or longer crash course, and actually that is a good thing.

Given the issues with the book being out of date, I have decided to slow down the pace with this course of study, but keep at it. I am not moving it to the back burner, but instead turning down the heat. I have a new book on order: Head First PHP & MySQL. This book is due in mid-September, and I should have the first book done by then and what I learned will help move forward with the new book. I should have read the reviews on Amazon before diving into the first book. If I had I would have started my studies with HTML a lot sooner.

Having said that, I now plan to refocus my efforts on learning HTML, XHTML, and CSS with the Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML from O'Reilly. This is where I should have started in the first place, but as they say - "you live and learn".

I thought that diving into PHP and MySQL with a crash course book would be give me some additional momentum towards my end goal, but unfortunately there were some issues. Fortunately the issues I encountered I was able to turn into good learning experiences.

Staying with it.

I decided to take a break after the late night session on Monday night / Tuesday Morning otherwise my efforts with the crash course book may have resulted in my crashing and burning.

The one thing I have learned from the reading this book so far is always make certain that the material you are reading about is up-to-date. Having said that, I will say that I did learn from my efforts, so I am staying with it. It will just take more than a weekend to finish this book though.

helloworld.php

It may not be a major milestone for many, but it is for me!

Considering I am using a book that references older versions of Apache, PHP, and MySQL, and all the changes that have taken place, I think getting the words "hello world" to appear in my browser by way of a PHP script is pretty good progress especially since that is several chapters down the road. Yeah, I just had to stumble ahead, but it was fun.

There seems to be some issues with getting the PHP CLI to work, though I think I just need to tweak some environment variables. A major change with MySQL is that winmysqladmin.exe is no longer available, and this will require some improvsation on my part, but I will manage.

(It's really late, so please excuse any typos.)