An Australian fellow calling himself Leighmac will talk about Chicken Ti#ies, recipes, and PHP. PHP is a widely used Hypertext Preprocessor language - an open source, server-side, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages.

I have heard about this language (although, I am not a programmer), but have not had a chance to work with it very much in the past. While trying to customize some features for my new Directory site, I needed to learn a bit more about the extremely dynamic language.

Being more of a visual learner and not wanting to wade through a 4 inch thick reference manual - I performed a search in Google for PHP Video Tutorials not thinking that anything useful would come up. After visiting Leighmac’s site - I simply couldn’t believe my luck… I was surprised by his first video where he walked through the installation of an Apache, MySQL, PHP Server package for Windows called WAMP and a really neat PHP editor called PHP Designer 2006 (now, PHP Designer 2008), covering every little detail needed to get up and running and writing the practice code within about 5 minutes of the video’s ending. Note: Later in the series, he switches to a Programmer’s Text Editor called jEdit.

These videos are balanced with humor, and a level of detail that is rarely seen in videos which train folks about programming languages. Most people creating these sorts of videos, in my experience, make huge jumps in logic leaving out large amounts of information fully needed to understand the topic.

Leighmac walks you through all of the details needed to make a go at this language. Check his videos out and if you like them, make sure to give him a donation - yep that’s right… one of the best things about these videos is that they are absolutely free! All he asks is for a small $5, $10, or $25 donation if you feel like you benefited from the tutorials.