My first two days on the weather programming job consisted mainly of getting a feel for the Carleton weather website and the tools I’ll need to be comfortable with to work with it. I looked at the Carleton weather page and various other weather websites with a critical eye for both aesthetics and features, became familiar with the meanings of terms like heat index and relative humidity, and figured out where various sites get their forecast and past weather data (mostly NWS and NDFD, it seems). I also read through a bunch of mySQL tutorials online, and then began browsing through a book I picked up from the library on using PHP and mySQL to create database driven websites. The book is actually more helpful than the online tutorials I was looking at, and I think Will might find it to be a great resource when he starts using PHP to communicate with the weather database.
-Katherine