Much like DevEd, who I mentioned in my last JS post, I have been following Brad from Traversy Media for quite a while and greatly appreciate the work he puts into both his paid and free courses and videos. So, when I realized this course on Udemy was taught by him, I knew immediately that I was going to have to take it!
Projects
- The ShoutIt project was a nice intro(or, re-intro for me) to PHP while loops, database connections and insertions, as well as some basic SQL statements.
- The Quizzer project went through creating an editable PHP quiz with better syntax for connecting to the database and grading a user’s answers as they go through the quiz.
- The PHP Lovers Blog project introduces object oriented programming(OOP) with a constructor class as well as functions to select, insert, update, and delete data from the database. It also shows how to set up a more complex folder/file structure for larger projects and link files together through includes and link databases together using primary keys and foreign keys and JOIN statements.
- The Newtek project helped me to build my very first WordPress(WP) plugin. It uses jQuery with Ajax/Asynchronous JavaScript to create a widget in WP that allows a user to submit their name, email address, and message to a contact that is designated in the control panel of WP.
- The Address Book project was challenging because he uses the Foundation framework by Zurb but it has changed since the course was recorded so I had to reconfigure the JavaScript to get the AJAX to work properly. I liked how he showed how to add a loading image that shows until the data is fully loaded from the database. Users can add, edit, and delete contacts in the address book. Binding values from POST variables was a key piece to this project that was new.
- The Job Finds Board project introduces students to Cake PHP. This was my first time using this PHP MVC Framework. It was also the first time I had seen or worked with the HTML Kickstart Framework.
Rating
Unfortunately, the Job Finds Board project is extremely frustrating to follow along with since the videos are now 3 years old and no longer compatible with the new versions of PHP and Cake PHP. The same issue happened with the Kewl CMS project.
Since those 2 projects were the main ones I purchased the course for, I’d rate it 1 out of 5 and would NOT recommend it for purchase.
Brad is a great instructor and puts out new courses all of the time, so just make sure the course is newer before you buy it. There’s no way he could redo every course he makes when code and frameworks get drastic updates so I do not blame him at all. However, I do think Udemy should provide a way for students to warn other students about outdated courses like this. At least it was only $9.99.
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