When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a database
What follows may either make little sense to most readers, or will seem really tivial but... I get PHP.

I probably mentioned a few months ago that I was learning PHP for work. It would allow me to generate dynamic content for a website from a database. It was originally made in the mid-90s by a forward thinking guy who wanted to create better websites than pure HTML would allow, even if he didn't have full control of the server.

With the right books, and lots of practice, I've really figured out how to make PHP sing. Learning most of the basics of the language, especially in dealing with MySQL(the open source database language much of the net is hiding in).

Coupled with a decent knowledge of CSS and HTML, PHP has really opened up what I can do on using the Internet. I've started automating tedious tasks that I didn't enjoy doing in the past. I've looked at problems and saw ways I could solve them using PHP. I've even started thinking in little chunks of code on sometimes.

My goal is to try to track down some people that need coding done to pick up some extra money.

Before I go though...

A few things that are awesome about PHP

-It's server side, which means no cross-browser issues like with javascript
-It's server side, which means it's more secure than javascript (though I haven't started closing off my scripts to SQL injection attacks yet)
-The documentation is available online, and it's popular so usually if I have a problem, someone else has had it.
-No declaring variable types.
-It can be used in neat tricks (like dynamically generating a select box)
-It is not C++ (Which I'm still probably going to have to learn).