Rodent Regatta

Look at this quote:

if youre going to learn about MySQL or PHP, especially if you want to learn about both, grab any one of the many freely available open source applications, install it, and then learn by tweaking.

Shelley Powers
Burning Bird
Survival Guide to LAMP: Taught By Tweak

When I started writing this weblog in January of 2002, that was my theory. I thought I could learn HTML and later XHTML and CSS just by doing. I’ve learned a lot, but I’m no where close to where I ought to be. I’ve had many, many (costly) false starts.

I’ve read books that spend the better part of 150 pages telling you ”how web design has always been done,” only to hit you with CSS and XHTML on page 151. Why learn all the bad (tables) habits if they are no longer the preferred way to do things? Why learn upper case tags if XHTML insists they be lower case?

I’m not much closer to a proper way to learn all this stuff. However, I’m’ confident that if you can identify the tools you want to learn, then find someone who really knows those tools and can teach you without overemphasizing ”the way we use to do it,” you’ll be better off.