Well, in building thebrightwells.com I decided to build an address book from scratch utilizing PHP and MySQL.
All in all I’m pretty proud of the progress I’ve made on it, other than a few stupid mistakes (luckily Matt W. pointed out an extra comma which drove me nuts for a good 45 minutes), I learned a lot in a short time.
The biggest issue was the fact that neither the MySQL, nor the PHP book sitting upon my shelves presented some of the key concepts in a manner that would make sense to me. After combing through a ton of online tutorials and gathering the occasional glimmer of knowledge I made my way down to Borders to pick up Beginning PHP 4.
The book was well worth the money as I was able to complete the entry editing and deleting functionality after reading two of the chapters.
Somehow I have managed to get myself into a position where I have to learn (or expand my knowledge of) several technologies in a short amount of time. It feels great. As Gunny Ermey would say “Ooorah!”