Learning PHP

TheCrabb

TheCrabb

Banned
Oct 9, 2009
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South Africa
Back in the day I taught myself HTML and come classic .ASP, but never bothered to learn any more programming when I discovered that there was a lot more money to be made by learning SEO, PPC and all the other marketing stuff.

Anyway, lately I am doing a lot with Wordpress and some other open source CMSs like Joomla and Drupal, but I love what I'm hearing about the upcomming WordPress 3.0 release so I guess I'll be using WP a lot more in the future.

Trouble is that I know NO php - like nothing, zilch! And I guess it's finally time to knuckle down and learn some php programming so that I can make the open source code do exactly what I want it to without trying to find a decent coder to do it for a reasonable price everytime.

So what are the best resources to learn php from scratch... like right fom the most basic "hello world" right up to some fairly sophisticated database work.

Is there one specific book or website or video course or whatever that you would recommend above the others? And is there anything that I would be better off avoiding?
 


When I first started learning I watched the videos over at killerphp.com, however it looks like they aren't all free anymore.
 
best thing you can do is go read a tutorial or two, then decide on a small project you'd like to work on for yourself. then once you complete that you can move on to bigger and better things :)
source: personal experience
 
If you are a person who does the self-taught thing pretty well then just open up any PHP script and look at it. If you have touch ANY programming language ever a lot of it will be obvious very fast. Open up a script in one window and php.net website in another window. Download the php.net help files to your machine for easy access.
 
Tizag is good. Also, I'd like to reiterate the suggestion about picking a project. Find something you want to do and grind your way through it looking up answers specific to what you're trying to achieve. That's the best way to learn IMHO. If you know a little ASP, it should be pretty easy for you.
 
pileofcrap said:
php.net Obvious I know but I always go back there for references. PHP: PHP Manual - Manual
Click to expand...

This is the number one tip that I always suggest to people starting out new and I cannot stress it enough. The library that comes with PHP is packed with goodies that so many people miss out on and end up reinventing the wheel. Case in point: a couple of the submissions to the PHP warchest either already existed in the library or where easily rewritten by combining a handlful of methods.

The more general and still very applicable point is to remember that most problems have already been tackled at one point or another, either in part or in whole. With this in mind, don't kill yourself trying to do everything from scratch. Take a look around first and see if you can't find some code from someone doing something similar.
 
Kewl - thanks guys... most of those resources look pretty good.

I recon I'm gonna take J.K.M's advice and fight my way through an "easy" project, get my hands dirty and learn from experience.

I've got a couple of crappy commercially available databases of recipes and shit like that so I'll do something around one of those.

I'm just waiting for a new hosting account to be activated so I guess I'm gonna be back here asking a load of dumbass beginner questions very soon... you might as well start with the dickrolls and the "I'll-Google-that-for-you"s now....
 
Also remember that if you have an idea for something you want to code, chances are someone else has already written a library for it that you can adapt for your purposes ;)
 
moomycow said:
Also remember that if you have an idea for something you want to code, chances are someone else has already written a library for it that you can adapt for your purposes ;)
Click to expand...

Exactly, I like phpmailer-fe and dadabik, Xataface looks good. There's also tons of code out there to do simple stuff to either copy or learn from. There's always code on each function page on php.net.

I agree with phyrcom ,the O'Reilly books are good.
 
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