Chris Dickman (bio)

This occurred during a summer of my youth. In the remote lakeside cabin in which the days passed lazily by, I discovered the owner had diabolically provided just two scratchy disks for the antediluvian record player: the "greatest hits" of Madame Jenkins and another aptly titled Speed the Parting Guest. My initial experience with PHP and MySQL was only slightly less painful.

PHP is the scripting language most commonly employed for the creation of dynamic web pages, typically in conjunction with the MySQL relational database management system. Rich web applications based on technologies like Adobe AIR are no doubt the future, but the PHP/MySQL combination is driving millions of sites. Its cost factor of zero, coupled with its relative ease of mastery, add up to a solution that will continue to be deployed for some time.

The trick phrase, if you missed it, was "relative ease of mastery." My background is in the graphic arts and the humanities, not the sciences. So in the summer of 2001, after having picked a PHP/MySQL-based content management system on which to build Graphics.com, I abruptly hit the wall when it came time to tweak the PHP code to meet my needs. I had been hand-coding sites since 1995, but nothing prepared me for things like using metacharacters to describe patterns of text within regular expressions. Huh? So I did what anyone else in my situation would do: I bought the biggest book on PHP development I could find. Which quickly led to the second typical step: I gave up. Leading thus to the inevitable third step: I hired someone who actually knew what he was doing.

While that approach got the site launched, it has always bugged me that I really don't know what's going on under the hood. Sometimes wacky things happen and fixing them is beyond me. Or there's an improvement I'd like to make that I imagine wouldn't be that complex to code. But, much as with opera, my sporadic attempts at scripting mastery have fizzled out.

Lately, however, I'm back at it once again, having selected yet another massive tome (774 pages!) as the source of my enlightenment. It's early days yet, but I'm confident that this time the result will be more than simply bringing down Graphics.com in 10 seconds flat (cough). I'm speaking here of Head First PHP and MySQL, published by good old O'Reilly Media. There is apparently an entire series of Head First books covering web site dev topics such as JavaScript, Ajax and HTML, all using metacognition principles to help the reader actually master and retain the material, not a bad idea when it comes to technical topics.

As you can imagine, I'm working my way through this monster at a modest rate but as I indicated, either I'm just getting smarter as the years go by (insert self-mocking chuckle) or the unusual approach of authors Lynn Beighley and Michael Morrison is a better fit for me than the old school, dry-as-dust one that I've previously encountered. You can decide for yourself by checking out the first chapter, which I recently posted on Graphics.com.

Which brings me back to opera. As it happens, my wife recently took up opera singing (no joke!), so perhaps I can develop a taste for even that. As the Marquis de Sade once said, "It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure."

Chris Dickman
Graphics.com