(Note: You might want to bookmark this post, even if it isn't relevant today it probably will be at some point)

My single greatest asset to making money online is the ability to program PHP and Mysql.

I'm not even very good at it by academic standards, many people can code pages in less lines of code than me, many people use better coding architectures, yadayadaya, I don't really care.

What I'm good at is coming up with an idea and having the ability to get it coded very quickly. (And I'm only just beginning to use this "power" muwahahaha). And if time permits I will try and improve the code.

The Internet Experiment asked me the following two questions and I thought I would share the answer for everyone. Each person learns differently so these thoughts may not work for you.

"where I should start learning" to program?

how long does it normally take before I can create something basic?

The easiest way to learn to program is to start programming.

No books required. Create a problem, such as, "I want to program my own blog" and then break it down into small steps. Then research how to do each step on the internet. All the answers are right here. Like this.

First

create a document called myblog.php and put the following text in it:

<?php echo "This is my new blog"; ?>

Then upload that to your server. You should now see a web page that says This is my new blog.

Second

we want to pull some posts to show people. This assumes we have a database with some posts in it.

So go learn to create a table in a mysql database (which is dead simple if your host uses phpMyAdmin). You might need fields like title, date, username, thepost, etc. It's your database and your blog software so it's up to you.

Now that we've got our database (manually put a few posts in it for starters) we need to make the web page read the from the database and put them on the page. So...

Learn how to connect to the database and print the results from the data. Add that code to myblog.php and keep tweaking it until it works and shows the posts from the table in the database you just created.

Third

Now we've learned how to make tables in databases and read the contents out onto our web page, we need to be able to put stuff in the database easily, or create an "admin" area.

You will need to learn how to make a basic php form and get the variables you enter there back into php.

Fourth

Now we have our post to write to the database from our form, we already know how to connect to the database, this time we only want to tell the blog software to INSERT the new info into the table in our database.

Good Job

You now have a blog that is one web page and an admin panel to update the page (whoopie). You obviously might want more features like the ability to leave a comment, pagination, categories, etc. but you can see how breaking things down into small bite sized pieces makes programming them much easier.

That's how I would recommend you learn to program.

Finally

I've been programming for a handful of years (Visual Basic) before I learned PHP so I have a considerable advantage when I started learning than you probably will (I started programming php in 2005). I honestly can't answer how long it would take somebody to learn to program.

If I had to guess you could build the 1 page blog like I mentioned above in a weekend (working most of it). Learning to make more complex applications would probably take months, however the process gets quicker and quicker with each project you build, each line of code you create and can reuse in new projects, etc.

It's not impossible and I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND you start the process now instead of later on your journey, it is a tremendous asset.

However, in the meantime, you can't put your empire on hold, so i would recommend outsourcing the work while you learn to code yourself. In which case google will have just as good a guess as I would who to hire.

Don't delay, start programming today!

Resources:

The PHP Bible.

If you are really down with the book learning here is a free one I liked when I was starting.

I also like HTML KIT as my code editor.

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