Nathan's right. Practice practice practice practice. Aside from that, it helps if you learn the MVC principle (it's highly useful in web development, but just as much in any other kind of development) and get familiar with some design patterns. I'll urge you to get familiar with them, but don't program in design patterns. They're good to learn how to structure your code, but they're not lego blocks to build your code with. Also read up on some basic best practices. I used to put all my forms in one huge file, and all my functions in another. That's a horrible mess to maintain afterwards. If you read up on best practices before you start, you'll avoid such nightmares.


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Oh, and most importantly: take a break every 3 hours, max! If you don't, you'll just make a mess, waste tons of time doing stuff like: "But why do I get no results from my database? The query's right there!" while you got the query, but never executed it. I've seen plenty of people (myself included) make that mistake when starting out, and wasting up to 5 hours looking for it, while all that was needed, was taking regular breaks, which'll avoid such problems.

This post has been edited by auto system, Sun, April 29th, 2012 at 22:16

Reason: auto merged post