2013 was a banner year for me, I decided to focus my attention on taking my web development know-how to the next level (I happen to live in an area brimming with prospects for knowledgeable web developers). Towards that end I have spent much of my free time in 2013 reading almost everything that Larry Ullman has recently written on PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, Ajax, XML, JSON, and OOP, as well as "The Definitive Guide to HTML5" by Adam Freeman, "Beginning jQuery" by Jack Franklin, "Programming The Mobile Web," by Maximiliano Firtman and others (when, basically, Larry Ullman hadn't written anything dedicated to those subjects...)
However, I understood that shifting from one subject to the next at this pace would dampen my long-term retention and protract my course of progress. So, at the same time, I took meticulous notes, creating supplementary documentation, excel spreadsheets, charts, and anything else that I thought would help me to refresh my memory quickly. I finished my jQuery book just before the new year, and having looked around for the next logical topic to research, I have come to the conclusion that I need to shift gears and take a deeper-dive into what I've covered so far. That is, I would like to utilize all of the supplemental materials that I've created and, using Mr. Ullman's suggestions and review and pursue notes to work on the comprehensive working examples, with the goal of finishing them as launch-able sites (in this book a message board and user registration application).
Hopefully, people who have read the books will also find value in my charts (they often assume you own the books and reference page numbers), will be able to work alongside me as I (attempt to) finish off the working examples and maybe even be willing to offer some tips and advice on my code. I will be creating new threads for each example I begin in order to cut-down on clutter, following a naming convention of "Ch. 17 Review and Pursue - Message Board Example" For a taste of what is to come, here is my chart of Chapter 6, "Database Design."
The starting point is the box with the thick border and bold font in the middle, titled "Database Design aka Data Modeling." From there, you follow the arrows, however supplemental information is represented by dashed lines within the arrows. You will have to find your way back to the main item and continue with the solid arrows when you follow supplementary information. Groupings are contained within dashed boxes. Headings, or big ideas, are represented with solid boxes. Thanks for reading...
