This is one of those skills I really need to update. I want to learn PHP as that’s the kind of blog and forum software I tend to use, but I have only the most rudimentary knowledge of it. Back in high school and college I took languages like BASIC, Fortran and Pascal. Not exactly popular web languages. But it does give me some feeling for the logic.

While the main thing I need to do is buy some books and dig in, I just learned about a forum that can help you to learn programming. Appropriately named Programming Help, it has about 20,000 members and reasonably active forums.

As I make the time to get more serious about this, no doubt I’ll be doing tons of reading in the PHP forum. One language at a time, so don’t expect that I’ll look beyond that for a time.

Ah, yes, I will be getting myself back into my old hair pulling habits of trying to find that one bit of code that wasn’t written quite right. I was always the student with the really weird problems back in school, such as the program that didn’t run until the day they updated the computers… no changes but suddenly it worked! Drove my teacher nuts.

At least minor programming skills can be quite useful to you if you run a website. In many cases you may be better off hiring a programmer, but understanding how it all works can make it easier for you to ask for the features correctly and to fix minor problems yourself.