Today with Doug’s help I successfully installed XAMPP on my computer so that I could really start playing around with mySQL! The excitement wore off a little bit as I realized there are only so many neat tricks I can do with various fake databases of fake tables I created on the mySQL end through the terminal – either that or I just haven’t discovered the really cool stuff yet. Still, I worked through a good portion of the “PHP and MySQL” book on using mySQL databases and now feel pretty comfortable performing most of the basic operations involving tables of data, so I’m looking forward to getting to work with some actual databases from the weather project. I also started reading about using PHP script to communicate with the mySQL databases and pull data to display on a webpage, and even though that’s more Will’s end of things I started going through a PHP tutorial towards the end of the day. I’m not sure how much I’ll get to deal with that on my end of the project, but it was fun anyway.
-Katherine