Beginners PHP

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Jim
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Beginners PHP

Post by Jim »

Anyone have a good place to go for beginners tutorials? Preferable step-by-step? I'm looking around at different tutorials all over the net and am becoming very confused ;)
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abionifade
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Post by abionifade »

PHP from the Ground Up -

Webmonkey is a great site for beginers.

Good background and excellent tutorials which will build you up gradually.

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/ ... page2.html

-Abi :)
Jim
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Post by Jim »

I've done the from-the-ground up tutorial.

Are there any more? Should I move on to more tutorials on WebMonkey?

Thanks!
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fatal
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Post by fatal »

Check out http://www.php.net, everything you need will be there. The PHPDN sites would also be a good start. But still the best advise is to pick up a book.
robpet
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Best book!

Post by robpet »

16 months ago I started learning PHP with no prior coding experience. After working on it fulltime for the past year, I'm half-way decent, but still have a lot to learn.

During my learning process, I bought literally every book available on PHP. The best by far to get you started is Julie Meloni's PHP Essentials (which also covers beginning MySQL). It's inexpensive and one of the clearest teach yourself books I've ever seen. The book is much too simple for an experienced coder switching to PHP, but for someone without a lot of experience, it's perfect. You can work through the whole book in a week or so and find yourself coding! Before I found Meloni's, I had tried with the WROX Professional PHP and the Beginning PHP4 books, plus SAM's book and several others. They are all much to complex for the novice and I nearly gave up trying to learn. After you've mastered Meloni's, I'd recommend moving on to WROX Professional PHP or WROX Beginning PHP4. I use Professional PHP the most, but that might just be because I started with it and am comfortable with it.

If you want to learn seriously, you really need to buy all the books available because they all have weak points. When I'm stuck on something, I will literally thumb through 8 books or so, hoping that at least one has what I want. For more esoteric topics, I may indeed only find what I want in one book. Some stuff isn't in ANY of the books, and for that I turn to the forums, particularly DevShed.com. Because they've been up for several years, there's a tremendous backlog of material.

One book I'd recommend against, although it sounds great, is the PHP Developers Cookbook. After a year working everyday with PHP, and after having built a very complex website, this book is still way over my head. The problem is they don't do a good job of explaining what the code is for or what it does. I've never found one useful idea or piece of code in it.

After the WROX books, the one I use the most is PHP and MySQL Web Development by Welling and Thomson. It often has clearer explanations of tricky stuff than the WROX books.

Two cheap books that can be useful at times are the SAM's PHP4 in 24 hours and the Visual Quickstart Guide. Of the two, I use SAM's more often because it has clear code examples.

I don't often use MySQL/PHP Databsae Applications by Greenspan and Bulger because it's very project-oriented. It would probably be useful if I had time to work through it, but I'm too busy doing my own coding, and it's not laid out to be a useful thumb-through reference.

For MySQL, I find the best is always the classic New Riders book, although I often get good help from the Welling and Thomson book. I think it does a good job of showing ways that PHP and MysQL work together.
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Post by jason »

One book I'd recommend against, although it sounds great, is the PHP Developers Cookbook. After a year working everyday with PHP, and after having built a very complex website, this book is still way over my head. The problem is they don't do a good job of explaining what the code is for or what it does. I've never found one useful idea or piece of code in it.
Odd, I would suggest that one to many people. It's a very good reference, and I found the explanations more the necessary. It was never meant to be a tutorial based book, but for giving you the answer quickly and easily, it works.

Granted, its no Perl Cookbook from O'Reilly, but for it's intended purpose, it is good.

However, I will go so far to say that after doing this for 3 years, I rarely pick it up now.
Jim
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Post by Jim »

Thanks :)

I'll look into those books, though I'd much rather learn from the net alone if possible. I don't have a billion dollars to spend on books right now :(.

If only PHP.net weren't so frickin confusing...
jason
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Post by jason »

http://www.php.net/manual

Not every confusing, besides, you have us to pester :D
Jim
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Post by Jim »

Hehe, I'm all proud of myself...

I just created my first form handler. It was easy as hell, but last time I used one I had to download it from somewhere. Of course, it's not complete yet, and I'm looking for a place which will tell me how to make some forms impossible to skip...

but...

Whatever. :)
pankajdeoria
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Re: Beginners PHP

Post by pankajdeoria »

Hi ,
Thank To all.
I am also new to this PHP.
Thank for the information.

PAnkaj Gupta
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