Hey guys, I just recently came across this board through a link from Pixel2life's tutorial list, been lurking for a couple of days and thought I'd sign up to start learning from, and chatting with, all you guys.


I've been coding in PHP for 3 years, and I was thrust WAY into the deep end when I first started, I got took on by a company even though the knew I had less than 3 months' experience with PHP (I had around a year's worth of experience coding in Visual Basic, 4 years HTML, but I was NOT a PHP programmer) - I will tell you this, if you could see the code to the first site I made with this company you would bitch slap me EVERYWHERE. Just terrible, but man did it help put a rocket up my arse and I progressed and I'm currently at a comfortable level of mediocrity. I spent 2 years at Lancaster University studying Computer Science, I dropped out in April because of deep depression and personal issues, I'm currently on the up, completely poor but content which is something I'm extremely grateful for, and I do NOT regret leaving Lancaster to return home. Through that time I spent 2 years studying Java, which really got me to buck my ideas up about OOP and I've progressed quite well I think, I'm still an 'average Joe' coder and hopefully with the help of this place I'll really start digging in and writing 'proper' code

I've played guitar for nearly 7 years now and it's something I love doing, I also studied Music Technology in college and I enjoy working on recording local bands and running sound at some small gigs, nothing major and I'll never consider it career material but I really do love it!

I have worked on quite a few sites in my time but it's all mostly basic PHP and MySQL stuff, I really want to try my hands at some more complex sites that would need OOP and some more advanced PHP code, just to see how I handle it.

Anyway, sorry I've rambled more than enough, just want to say thanks for being a FANTASTIC community and knowledge base, major kudos to everyone involved with TalkPHP!