First off thanks to anyone who responds. Second, please forgive any beginner mistakes.

Ok, I'm pretty new to programming, but not computers, I have quite a bit of experience in other areas, so I'm new but not a 80 year old with her Dell. Also, I'm willing to spend quite a bit of time to teach myself or find instruction elsewhere, so the sky is the limit.

First of all I want to use Google Maps API with mashups of congressional districts so it would be possible to enter my address or zip +9 code to find my elected officials.

I know this part can be done, because numerous other peeps have accomplished similar feats, I'm just unsure how I would implement it. As I understand, this would need to be done using PHP right? Incase this changes things, I would like to be able to route the results to an email server, so you would be able to email those congress members that came up in the results using a web form.

I'll stop before I get too ahead of myself. Again, I sincerely thank anyone who responds. Any and all info would help. Resources, classes, etc. anything is very helpful. Thanks again.

-Seth

Seth,

PHP is just one language that can accomplish your task, but I think it's a great place to start. Before jumping in to API's, pre-built libraries and the like, I'd start with some good tutorials and work your way through them, then on to some advanced techniques. A little background theory and mathematics never hurt either

You'll find plenty of learn-to-code-in-PHP sites online. I'm from the old school that prefers books (the tangible bounded things made of dead trees) O'Reilly (ora.com) offers some excellent books. The book Programming PHP is as fine a place to start as any in my humble opinion.

I would start by learning the basics before trying to apply them to a big idea. You might get really bogged down. Start small, learn HTML, CSS, PHP. Then MySQL. You may want to stay away from frameworks until you get more knowledgeable, but in the end frameworks will make coding the site you describe a whole lot easier.

I am also trying to snatch a little time at my hand to learn this site development or html, not yet on the stage on php since i am very new on this html coding, am a fast learner and willing to learn new things, and thanks for the great tips. hopefully i can grab the basic towards advance coding