elephpant

I just zipped through the PHP course in the Codecademy "Language Skills" section.

As is typical of beginner-friendly Codecademy language skill courses, it starts from the beginning with variables, flow control, etc. If the student is already aware of such basic concepts, this can get very tiresome.

This PHP class flew through basic topics. This is great for experienced programmers already familiar with the concepts and just wanted to see how PHP differs from the other languages. The downside is that, if a student is truly a beginner, they wouldn't have received much help and would probably be lost.

I thought the class would get into more difficult topics, or areas specific to PHP and web development and... it didn't. After covering the basics of declaring classes and class inheritance, the class stops. Even though the introduction mentioned that PHP web apps can contact databases and other server-side resources, this class didn't cover any of the meat-and-potato of writing web applications with PHP.

Overall, the class is a superficial skimming of the surface for PHP. Good for somebody who just wants to see a quick view of PHP basics, and I appreciated it for that, but bad for somebody who actually wants to figure out how to do useful things with PHP.

I'll have to look elsewhere for that.

Loopiness

Unrelated to the skimpy curriculum is a problem with the interactive learning development environment. In other Codecademy courses, the student writes the code and presses a button for it to be executed and evaluated. In this class, evaluation is constantly happening before the button is pressed. The upside is that feedback for errors are instant, no waiting until the end. The downside is that it's easy to make it go into an infinite loop.

Example: If this was the goal:

$abc = 1;

while ($abc < 10)

Just before we type "<10" the state would be:

$abc = 1;

while ($abc)

Which is an infinite loop that sends the evaluation code spinning uselessly. So when the student actually presses the button later, the gear just spins.

Workaround: copy the newly-typed code into the clipboard, hit refresh on the browser to reset and reload the page, then paste the code in.