bigrodey77

Just my two cents but...

Being in collge now, I think it would be more beneficial to use PHP. JS might be easier to use seeing all you need is a web browser and Notepad, but don't most schools give web space to students? My old school did.

From my personal experience, I took much, much better to PHP than I have Javascript. It seems like anytime I look up a tutorial online or a snippet of code for somewhere, the syntax is different. Maybe I'm weird.

Do you plan on having them type everything in or use some sort of editor like Dreamweaver or Frontpage. For what would probably be the course equivalent of what you are teaching, my old school *required* the class to use Frontpage. We didn't do any programming in the class although we did have to build a database in Access and learn some basic SQL. Come to think of that, I think that skipping the programming all together and making them build a database and learning some basic SQL would be much more beneficial than learning PHP, Javascript, Python, or whatever language you may choose. Learning about a database, how it works, how to make one, basic forms even, can prove to be much more real world worthy than programming; something they may or may not have any interest in doing for the rest of their lives. Perhaps I'm closed minded and stereotyping a group of people when I don't think that many students in a general computer literacy course are going to switch majors to an IT related field of study.

Programming at any level isn't for everyone although when I had a class in BASIC in high school, there definately were no future computer scientists in that class but everyone loved it.

However if you must go through the programming route, I would recommend PHP because there is much less room for error than with Javascript.

DaWei

Without addressing Tromba's issue in this post, I'd be very interested in hearing about some source material for that statement.

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tromba

It's all been by hand until now. They can now use anything they like. I showed them NVU since that's free (we don't have any computer labs since we give everyone a laptop when they enroll)Good point. THey don't have a database, but could get OpenOffice.org and use that database. Might be worth considering.
This is definitely just to get some idea of what programming is about. Just like our html -- we got a couple of steps past "Hello World" and some students struggled get there, others went and found all kinds of other things to do. Thanks for your reply

bl00dninja

well, alot of people have problems with "hello world"...if they're messing with hello world then they're obviously starting, but yeah, i like threads of the type:

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT!?!

well i'm sure whatever you do, your students will probably have fun and may get exposure to crap they might not have otherwise. i got hooked on this from looking at html and realizing it's not a hard as you might think (and sometimes harder then you could ever imagine).

:p

good luck!

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Arevos

I'm somewhat divided on this issue. On the one hand, Javascript is arguably the more consistant language, and web browsers are common enough that anyone can develop code with it. On the other hand, Javascript is often tricky to debug (no STDOUT or inbuilt logging mechanisms to make life easier), and PHP has a greater internal library.

The main problem with PHP, however, is that it's somewhat more difficult to set up a web server than it is to install a simple interpreter. Still, if each student has a certain amount of webspace available to them, and the hosting web server is PHP-capable, then it may very well be possible to do.

I generally recommend Python, myself; easier to install and to find good beginners guides for.

tromba

The webserver for the class is in my office (it's a linux running Mandriva), and it's got PHP installed, so access shouldn't be a problem.

Arevos

PHP shouldn't be too hard to teach, then. It's certainly a useful skill to have; many web hosting companies nowadays offer PHP at rather low prices, so some PHP knowledge might come in handy. It also has immediate results that students can see.

As for a beginning PHP tutorial, I don't know of any that would fit that exact bill. Most PHP tutorials I've seen are written for programmers learning a new language, rather than for beginners starting from scratch.

Chicken001

I noticed after learning Java, or taking the course in Java, PHP was a breeze to pick up.

PHP is quite useful, I just learned from taking glances at source codes and comparing, then, testing it out from tutorials.

Mocker

Just took a look at the tutorials by bulio and headzoo, those are both pretty nice and start off with the basics. If they already put together some simple html pages, I would suggest starting them with simple form php scripts.
Like.. Put your name in the box, then have php echo it, just to get an immediate feel for how you can have it work in a website.
Then from there you can get into basic variables, data structures and functions.

I think php is probably a really good choice since you have a webserver going anyways. It looks friendlier and is super easy to start with.

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