Sharpen your tools and remember the problems you are trying to solve. Building software is just like building anything else and the first effort should be getti

Sharpen your tools and remember the problems you are trying to solve. Building software is just like building anything else and the first effort should be getting your tools in the proper state - that means having a good IDE, a good and private workplace, clean directory structures on your (hopefully linux) PC. Basically, you should learn programming environments (eclipse, emacs) and PCs (how exactly does this thing work? Coding = telling a computer what to do). Knowing what problem you are really trying to solve will avoid the biggest pitfall in programming - premature optimisation. Get your environment setup, focus in and separate problems into various smaller, isolated sub-problems. Stay clear on what you are doing and don't get side tracked by "interesting" problems. Honestly, I would say you should try to get away from PHP and learn a proper compiled language - Java is my favorite.