Unit 10: Getting My Hands Dirty

Since last week was mostly conceptual, I was really excited to finally get into actually doing some coding. I love getting my hands dirty, figuratively of course. I have to admit that I really didn't have a hard time with any of this weeks work. Instead a lot of it was a great way of reflecting on the things that we've learned throughout the semester. 

It was really neat to rehash learning about creating users and security levels just like we did about Linux, but this time in MySQL. I really did enjoy the coursework video and Joshua’s choice usernames for his sample accounts. There's something about having both a teachers pet and that best friend that will mess everything up as a great example for showing everyone how everything can get screwed up by letting someone you don't trust into your system.

Next I got to rehash all of what we learned about installing Webmin. When I first used Webmin, I was very unimpressed with it weeks ago. But it was really cool to be able to create tables and databases very fast and with ease. If I wanted to add a ton data really fast, I think I would use Webmin to do it, because for me it’s the quickest way of doing.  Of course everyone has their own personal choice for how they like to enter data and I'm sure many people would disagree with my favorite being Webmin.

Next installing, installing and installing was the name of the game, and it brought me back to when we first created our LAMP server. This time we installed phpMyAdmin. This software is definitely my choice for testing MySQL Queries. I think the fact that you can simply copy and paste from one window to another and then apply and see what happens it a lot easier than creating a query on the command line and continually getting errors until you get a working product. I'm assuming that's why I was told that this is probably the preferable program for using MySQL and creating a databases.

Last but definitely not least we made a text file and turned it into a table. It's really nice to know that there are so many different ways to do the same thing. I think that was the point of this week. This week we learned the versatility of being able to create databases and tables for MySQL in so many different manners.

To end my exciting week it was very cool to create my very own queries made of all kinds of different verbiage and testing them out.  Sometimes my code worked and sometimes it took forever to figure out what I was doing wrong. All in all this was a very exciting week, and I love learning and creating something and then being able to look back and see the architecture.