How did you learn php?

The way I learned PHP was to find something I really needed to do and then just started trying to do it in PHP, I find the PHP website (http://www.php.net) is a great place for information and example code. Once you start getting your code to work you can slowly make it more complex, start from a simple 'Hello World' and go from there.

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The Net is Dying | Vanilla Source - Vanilla Help, and mods

Cheers for that simon

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Thanks for sharing...very helpful

hello
W3schools.com is really very good for beginning. Also you can try sitepoint.com or other with same target. You can try with official site php.net and zend.com. All big development sites also have php sections.
Good luck

I learnt PHP through a mate of mine. I wanted a user system for a website I was setting up and he talked me through how all the code worked. Then from there, I went on to make simple things myself and now i'm fairly good at it

I was totaly crap at Php 2 months ago, i decided to live breed & sh_t php tutorials: w3schools & video tutorials u can downlaod them. Am now learning frameworks & oop so it does pay off to blitz the tuition... I nagged the backside of other members here for help i realise now how easy it is to learn.. i mean lets face it its no C++ its only serverside code... U dont even have to declare your variables before using them...

Good Luck & happy code-ing!

Andy

Cheers andy, i agree with you by learning from video tutorials.

90% of my learning process is from lynda.com!
I love movie based tutorial

Ha ha yer heard those tutorials were ok!!! YouTube was the best for me!!!

The Lynda website costs money, but bloody hell its worth it!

I like to learn following the right flow, you know from chapter 1 to chapter 2 and so on.
In lynda.com they teach you the basic than move to the hard part so you don't get confused!

Cheers..

Damn, lynda does tuts for everything these days - racking my brain for 3d tuts.

I learn MS Word 2007 from lynda.. Muahahahahah...!!!
I mean learning the new features..

I learnt HTML from a book, tryed CSS, but hated it. Also learnt some JS from a book. I have a PHP book, but I find that the people who write it, know what they are talking about so they dont make it clear enough for those people who do not know a thing about PHP, I can kind of learn it, but its just putting a code together, i mean it i can learn for example..... arrays, then say if i learn for example a password check thing how would i combine the two, thats the problem i have.

I've tended to use dw's php scripts in the past, with amendments to the sql statements and session variables etc as needed (booo, hisss I hear ). Although DW cs3 has better php scripts, insofar as they work without need for fixes, I have a job I wanted to do 'properly' - so I understand what i'm doing and the security implications involved in database driven content. For that I picked up a copy of 'PHP Solutions - Dynamic Web Design Made Easy' so far it seems a brilliant beginners guide - explaining what, how AND why. I might actually learn something this time

Oh, I was lucky enough to be persuaded to learn css and xhtml at the same time, so I've not really had any issues migrating from tables.

2nd edit: It really annoys me the sites that try to charge fees for guides and tutorials on what is essentially an open source tool. Grrrr (<-- really annoyed, visceral, sound). Don't encourage them by buying from them - from what I've heard the solutions are not nearly as useful or relevant as people who provide assistance for free to 'help' rather than just earn cash.

You cannot learn Php from someone else!

Learn the fundimentals from W3schools,

Learn to mix & match functions\switch\loops & statements untill yer eyes hurt & yer on to a winner!

Find a good text editor like 'jedit or intype' !

As for dreamweaver i learnt to use dreamweavers inbuilt functionality first & it was the worts mistake of my life, now i just code everythink in text editors using the FTP plugins for the editors!

Also your mysql is just as important as php as is the structure of the database that that you are coding with you no when your goos with mysql when you start using relevance & match against querys!

Pleanty of functions to save creating spaggboll code is my method here is a basic example learner code i have just made :

PHP: Select all

<?php
// Connect to server & select database!
   function db_connect()
   {
      if (!$connection = mysql_pconnect('localhost','andrew','lloyd'))
      {
    return false;
      }
      if (!mysql_select_db('db_example'))
      {
    return false;
      }
   }
   
// Create function to data from rows!
   function select_example()
   {
      db_connect();
   
   $select = "SELECT
                example.id,
       example.title,
       example.description,
       example.company,
       example.location,
       example.url ";
    $from = "FROM
                example ";
    $where = "WHERE
                example.id > 0 ";
       
    $query = $select.$from.$where;
    
    $result = mysql_query($query);
    
    while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
    {
    print_r($row);
    }
   } 
   select_example();
   
   Function bla bla bla am border now()
   {
       
   }
   
?>

Good look all! if i can learn anyone can ha ha

I bought a sams teach yourself book - php, apache and mysql. I often refer back to this but also learn through web tutorials and .net magazine. I'm also a fairly confident user of xhtml/css illustrator/photoshop and have had to use php (my current learning ground) in my sites to accomplish various tasks, still picking things up everyday!

mwdesign