Big Nerd Ranch php5 bootcamp day 1

Sunday - Pre nerd camp Landed at ATL around 2pm and was shuttled with Ryan to the Big Nerd Ranch. I think this is going to be really good . I have never been much of a woodsman and I from the picture it looked like this was pretty remote however they have t1 connectivity to the rooms and many modern things. Also they had huge sandwiches waiting for us. Everyone is talking about how good the food is here. I got to meet our instructor Mark. He seems like a pretty good guy. Also the owner (I think) Aaron seems like a nice guy also. I could tell immediately he had worked for Apple. I know many people that had/have worked for Apple and he fits the mold. Those of you who know people that work for Apple know what I am saying. Monday - Day 1 Food:

• Breakfast - Fruit, Bacon, Eggs, Sausage - was really good
• Lunch - homemade potato chips (yes thin sliced potatoes), vegetable beef soup, Italian beef sandwich.
• Dinner - Chicken beast with veggies and rice.

Stuff learned/relearned: Arrays, strings, functions.... many things I have been using for a long time but never knew why I was using them the way I was. Also silly things like printf and sprintf... I am not sure why but I missed those things. Notes: Kind of a interesting way to teach. At times I was interested in the slides/lecture part but then sometimes bored. Then we had exercises after the slides/lecture and some challenges. The exercises were pretty much a typing test as we just copied stuff out of the computer. I did a few of these like that but then just copy/pasted off the instructors shared drive. I did enjoy most of the challenges although I think I only managed to actually solve one. I got pretty frustrated during some of them and gave up for a bit. I ssh'd into my web server and whoa... I learned some new things. I wrote a function to put various ads on my web pages in seconds. This alone was worth the money. Closing notes on day 1: Very cool overall. I am really looking forward to dealing with more advanced database and pear stuff. We are manually populating arrays and stuff like that right now and that is pretty boring. The food so far has been AMAZING. I cant wait for breakfast!