WebDev Update: PHP Contact Form

For the past year or so I have been returning to an old hobby – web development. You may have remembered my earlier post about coding and second language learning. First I worked on upgrading my knowledge of CSS (now CSS3) and HTML (HTML5), with some exercises in practical JavaScript and jQuery. I've also been working quite a bit with Twitter Bootstrap. I also dabbled in Wordpress and MySQL.

For the past month I've decided to primarily focus on dressing up some PHP samples. I took the The Complete Web Developer’s Course by Rob Percival, as well as the Code Academy PHP course, but it is still my weakest link.

What Coding and Language Learning Have In Common

Back in the bygone days of Myspace I learned my first foreign language. Eager to express my "individual" pre-teen self, I scurried over to W3schools and learned enough CSS and HTML to code my own layouts. With the rise of Facebook, I gradually shifted platforms, leaving my coding experience behind until college.

As I am now brushing up on my coding skills - and learning a few new tricks, I've noticed it's much easier to figure out than when I was 13. But that has little to do with age, and more about language experience. If you know how to learn another language, you can learn to code, and vice-versa.