Feeling excited about solving an interesting programming problem sounds incredibly nerdy, but it’s kind of like how you feel the first time you ever beat a videogame boss.

It is always exciting to get something working.

I knew I’d have to learn a ton about SQL queries and PHP to get this recipe thing happening, but I didn’t realise I’d have to learn some JavaScript as well. I’d always assumed that JS was pretty well only useful for rollovers (now supplanted by CSS) and archaic form submission.

Well, check this out. The boxes are all populated from arrays declared at the beginning of the code… but here’s the awesome part: Those arrays are all crunched out by PHP using the results of a query on three tables. It’s like a bizarre union between a server-side language and a client-side one. [ed: this is actually a much more common tactic than I'd first realised -- but NO ONE has tutorials on it.]

Anyhow, once the whole thing’s working, I’ll be conscripting some of you people to submit yummy things to it.

Learning feels great — because it’s never really lost time. You can build something that someone else will take apart, but you can’t really unlearn anything.

Mike

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