Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy. This forum is not for asking programming related questions.
I'm new here and am currently a Cold Fusion and ASP developer (im only 21 yrs old ) and want to learn more... but especially I want to learn PHP!
I feel PHP is a very powerful language and is open source (and seeing I work with mySQL most of the time your can't beat the combination of mySQL and PHP) and would like to learn this.
I live in the UK and want to know what is a good tutorial book for PHP? I learnt Cold Fusion and ASP from a book and am now very efficeint with both... so feel a book works really well... I just gotta find the right book!
So what books would you advise? And where is the best place to get it? Also did you use a book to learn PHP?
I have about 5 PHP books, although I find they all have basically the same info reading all of them gave me a very well rounded view of problems and solutions.
my work buys em so that helps too
I would suggest any basic PHP for beginners book at your local bookstore or go to amazon.com and wade through em.
I do not know if it is still available, but I like the Wrox Publishing series. The ugly red books with hideous pics of programmers on the front. *grin*
I utilized Wrox Professional PHP 4 in conjunction with the PHP manual and this forum to learn PHP.
I would suggest a book FAR ahead of online tutorials. Most tutorials are written by hack coders and using a book gives you the complete picture from start to end.
plus when you're done with a book you can put it on your shelf and impress the chicks with your knowledge of <span style='color:blue' title='I'm naughty, are you naughty?'>smurf</span> they'll never grasp (twigletmac exluded )
JPlush76 wrote:plus when you're done with a book you can put it on your shelf and impress the chicks with your knowledge of s**t they'll never grasp (twigletmac exluded )
Ah, good idea my friend. But, the only exception is that she actually knows the s**t in the books.
JPlush76 wrote:I would suggest a book FAR ahead of online tutorials. Most tutorials are written by hack coders and using a book gives you the complete picture from start to end.
Let me tell you. DON'T buy the JavaScript Bible by Danny Goodman distributed by IDG. It sucks.
Since that experience I have stuck to the Internet and found it very useful indeed.
I think a very good start to PHP programming is the PHP manual, wich also holds an introduction. Not very large though.
It also gives a nice bit about security
Let me state this.
Cut'nPaste doesn't work with books.
Heavy wrote:Let me state this.
Cut'nPaste doesn't work with books.
Ah, true, but not cutting and pasting is how I learned PHP (atleast got started on it). I figured out how everything was working in the script by typing each and every charector. And when I would miss a part of it by miss direction of eye sight, I would learn how to debug the current software quickly, instead of going word for word by the book.
Typing stuff in does give you more time to think about what you are doing - I'm trying to teach myself some C from a book and copying the code and compiling it is teaching me much more than just grabbing the code from a site and adjusting a few variables.
alright.
I didn't say that you have to Cut'nPaste just because it is possible.
I have always written all of my code by myself. I have never used a finished working script. So I'd say I learned to type my own mistakes.
I agree that books in general are good! But not all of them.
Maybe I should just escape from this thread as my first post took all the attention away from the questions in the first post... sooorey.
I hear what you're saying.. there are definately plenty of crappy books out there. I say a mix of books and online tutorials will get you well rounded in a good amount of time.