Had a look at OAuth. Obviously for the non programmers it's gonna take a while to grasp... I will give it a good go though... There'll be a lot of back pedalling and learning of basics to grasp the more advanced aspects of it... My short attention span and lack of patience certainly won't help... ?
This OAuth2 tutorial is kind of great in that it kills, well, six birds with one stone. Since it centers around PHP, I'd go with learning that language. You'll also learn Composer; a PHP dependency manager, Guzzle; a PHP HTTP client, Symfony; a PHP framework, and you'll become familiar with GitHub.
The same site that offers the OAuth2 tutorial has tutorials that cover each of those pieces too. Try the PHP tutorial first.
For me I think it's a case of not knowing what I'm learning about or for what purpose I'm learning it. Like being taught amazing football skills having never seen a football match... I tried php before on code academy but got frustrated with the "if" commands etc. Not very far at all... I'll give it another go. It seems to be the more popular/useful language... Cheers Ceit...
Codacademy is a terrible site. :p
I haven't looked at KnpUniversity's PHP tutorial yet, but I'm bouncing between the OAuth2, Symfony, and Guzzle tutorials right now, and it's the prior knowledge of PHP that makes them easy to pick up.
You'll need a text editor, this is GitHub's (and also the one they use in the tutorials. It's helpful to be able to follow along with exactly what they're doing)
https://atom.io/
Good stuff. Knp's tutorials are videos so immediately better than code academy. The terminology throws me so I look up definitions and end up looking up definitions for definitions and end up forgetting what the feck I was doing in the first place... ?
I do that too. The trick that I use for keeping track of it all, is to open each offshoot of my main search in a new tab. That way you can backtrack from right to left, tab by tab, closing them as you go.
I also keep the relevant tabs open to refer back to as needed. I currently have the OAuth tutorial open in one:
https://knpuniversity.com/screencast/oauth/client-credentials#play
The Coop API page in another:
http://coop.apps.knpuniversity.com/login
The OAuth Github repository:
https://github.com/knpuniversity/oauth
The documentation on Guzzle:
http://docs.guzzlephp.org/en/latest/
The documentation on Symfony:
http://symfony.com/what-is-symfony
And the PHP online manual:
https://secure.php.net/manual/en/
I like that the KnpUniversity tutorials have videos as well as a text transcript below. You can pause the video, find where you are in the transcript, and look up anything there that you need.