From PHP to JavaScript

I started my journey in the programming world developing web applications with PHP only! Of course, I had already learned the fundamentals of programming.

It was very fun and exciting, creating applications that were connected to a database. You can enter user data, query, update, and delete data. That was when I was still in school, where I even developed a system for the use of employees there.

Well, everything was very interesting and I liked it very much, but in a certain time something happened to bother me in the applications that I did. It was the page refresh.

Discovering JavaScript through JQuery

So I started a new journey and my mission was: To find a way to create applications that would work without the page refresh.

After doing a search and searching for solutions, I found a JQuery course. I had no idea what that was, but I got a free JQuery course, so I decided to do it.

I was very happy to know that I could do several actions on the page without needing refresh. I was very impressed with the use of the events, it made me really excited. I did the full course and I was able to understand how JQuery worked and it was actually a library that helped with JavaScript programming.

This course was simple but it was very useful for me to learn a little about DOM and about event handling, but something was missing. JQuery was very useful to me and solved my demand on page refresh. But how is access to the database? How will I persist application data?

Well, after completing the JQuery course, I started taking a new course online. This time it was JavaScript, the pure and simple (and amazing!) JavaScript. In this course I was able to understand how the DOM API works in a deeper way, I was able to understand some peculiarities of JavaScript, Regular Expressions and other interesting things.

Still in this course, I found what I was looking for. That is, I could now do the data persistence in an application without page refresh. I came to this conclusion when I discovered AJAX.

I simply loved AJAX

After discovering AJAX I started to make the applications using this technology. It was very simple, just request by JavaScript and perform an action in PHP. Anyway I found what I wanted, my applications were now integrated, with the front in JavaScript and the back in PHP

Conclusion

When I was starting out, I did not have in my computer residence and much less internet. I only used the computers and internet of the school. Besides, I also used the books that existed there.

My ability was still very small, but I used the possibilities I had to seek knowledge. If you are already an experienced programmer you know that these concepts that I have learned to learn are simple and even essential nowadays. Where you can do full applications in JavaScript, from front to back.

As the title says, that's how I left PHP for JavaScript. I do not deprive PHP, on the contrary I still develop applications with it.

It's interesting to realize what you can do with focus. Even without my own computer and without internet access I was able to evolve in programming learning. Believe me, you can too.

That's all, even more.