Assignments for Week #1 Meeting

[Matt Buscemi]

We've got a pretty light work load for our first week. There are two
readings on the syllabus (found here: http://p2pu.org/webcraft/node/13221/document/13222).
They are: "What is PHP?" http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php
and "What Can PHP Do?" http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro-whatcando.php.

You should read over these documents. For these readings and all
other readings in this course, I want to make it crystal clear that
you do NOT have to read documents that are linked within the
readings. You can, and should, follow up on things you are
interested. If a particular subject is interesting for you, feel free
to follow links on the PHP manual, do Google Searches on the topic,
etc. This is great way to learn! But, for the purposes of preparing
for class meetings, if I required you to read all the supporting
documents in the week on arrays, for example, you would probably end
up hating me (PHP has an immense list of array functions --
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/book.array.php -- and I find the naming
conventions of many of them truly bizarre; don't be scared, we'll only
be covering the most commonly used ones).

Also, a big part of our agenda is talking about about our expectations
for the course. What we think we'll learn, and how we'll monitor our
learning. During introductions, I want us all to address why we're in
this course, and what our motivation is for learning PHP. Think about
what motivates you and why you're here so you can address that during
the introduction. Also, if you have a blog, it might not be a bad
idea to blog about this topic in advance. Reply to this message with
link to your blog post, if you do this (it's optional!).

- Matt