Best way to learn PHP over the holidays??

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Mr.CookieMonster

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Hi,

I would like to learn PHP over the school holidays. What is the best way to learn it (from the bottom to the top)? I;m going to spend approx. 1 - 2 hours a day on it. Should I get tutorials + some ebooks??
 
Back when I wanted to learn PHP.... I got a textbook and it was as boring as could be.
So I grabbed some tutorials and followed them. Ran into issues, then googled how to solve it.

You will want to spend a touch more than just 1-2h a day on it, and starting out with it is fun too, so you will want to anyway :p

http://php.net/ <-- will become your best friend. Look at the bottom of pages (on function pages for examples from other coders)
http://www.w3schools.com/php/ <-- pretty useful too.
http://phptutorial.info/

And when you learn about using URL parameters and posting forms and SQL, learn (a lot) SQL-injection and XSS (and how to prevent it). It's important.
 
froot said:
Back when I wanted to learn PHP.... I got a textbook and it was as boring as could be.
So I grabbed some tutorials and followed them. Ran into issues, then googled how to solve it.

You will want to spend a touch more than just 1-2h a day on it, and starting out with it is fun too, so you will want to anyway :p

http://php.net/ <-- will become your best friend. Look at the bottom of pages (on function pages for examples from other coders)
http://www.w3schools.com/php/ <-- pretty useful too.
http://phptutorial.info/

And when you learn about using URL parameters and posting forms and SQL, learn (a lot) SQL-injection and XSS (and how to prevent it). It's important.
Click to expand...

And once you're familiar with the language, download a few open source php projects, OSCommerce, ELGG amongst other and look at how they do things. If you can, use a LAMP stack instead of a WAMP one as there can be complications with security and case-sensitivity on Windows that will distract you.
 
At the end of the year, I would like to build a really nice News / Downloads (open source only) / pictures (of my own), a mash of everything into one site (maybe hosted in SA.) If I learn over june holidays, lets say 2 - 3 hours a day, will I be ready to build such a site?

Also, Would it be better to print the material I learn from??
 
Your "readiness" all depends on how quick you learn.
I never bothered to print my material - google and bookmarked sites have been more useful.
 
froot said:
Back when I wanted to learn PHP.... I got a textbook and it was as boring as could be.
So I grabbed some tutorials and followed them. Ran into issues, then googled how to solve it.

You will want to spend a touch more than just 1-2h a day on it, and starting out with it is fun too, so you will want to anyway :p

http://php.net/ <-- will become your best friend. Look at the bottom of pages (on function pages for examples from other coders)
http://www.w3schools.com/php/ <-- pretty useful too.
http://phptutorial.info/

And when you learn about using URL parameters and posting forms and SQL, learn (a lot) SQL-injection and XSS (and how to prevent it). It's important.
Click to expand...

+1 to that.

SQL injection will be very important, although it is very easy now to "clean" user input. General rule, if the input comes from the user, it MUST be sanitized!

Take a look at .htaccess files as well, really easy to use to make very nice SEO url's
 
It's actually quite an easy language to learn if you have even just a little background programming knowledge and database background.
 
Check out the top-rated PHP books on Amazon. Not all of those programming books are boring. If you decide to get one, buy it locally, or "acquire" the PDF online.
 
ngadao08 said:
At the end of the year, I would like to build a really nice News / Downloads (open source only) / pictures (of my own), a mash of everything into one site (maybe hosted in SA.) If I learn over june holidays, lets say 2 - 3 hours a day, will I be ready to build such a site?

Also, Would it be better to print the material I learn from??
Click to expand...

If that's the site you are aiming for then being a hard core PHP coder is a waste of time, I can build the site you want(not pretty) in like 5 min using all of the opensource scrips available today. Rather get yourself a CPanel hosting package(with softaculous installed) and get to know the opensource scripts, pimp them to meet your needs and as soon as you don't understand whats going on, start googling and learn some more.

Having a site like that will require at least 5-7 hours work a day though, all of which will be spent on things that you aren't thinking about now because you didn't know they exist so you might want to stretch your 1-2 hours a day and make some effort. I remember holidays where I barely slept setting a simple java remoting to a dev server, think this was around grade 11.
 
Personally I'd recommend learning a decent language instead of the mess that is PHP.

Try Python or Ruby.
 
icyrus said:
Personally I'd recommend learning a decent language instead of the mess that is PHP.

Try Python or Ruby.
Click to expand...

I would tend to agree with this statement, but it is sometimes good having a little php know-how. All the stuff you want to code has already been coded by somebody else and most probably also be done a whole lot better than you would be able to achieve in a limited time frame. Look in to Joomla or Wordpress, will save you a lot of time.

On the other hand, if you need to do this site from scratch (maybe a project, etc) then sites like php.net and w3schools did help me to learn the basics. Forums can also be very useful if you need help with certain problems if you can't figure out how to achieve something.
 
DrJohnZoidberg said:
I would tend to agree with this statement, but it is sometimes good having a little php know-how. All the stuff you want to code has already been coded by somebody else and most probably also be done a whole lot better than you would be able to achieve in a limited time frame. Look in to Joomla or Wordpress, will save you a lot of time.

On the other hand, if you need to do this site from scratch (maybe a project, etc) then sites like php.net and w3schools did help me to learn the basics. Forums can also be very useful if you need help with certain problems if you can't figure out how to achieve something.
Click to expand...

Can I get some joomla / Wordpress tutorials somewhere?

What can Ruby programming do? make programs or is it more of the web side?
 
ngadao08 said:
Can I get some joomla / Wordpress tutorials somewhere?

What can Ruby programming do? make programs or is it more of the web side?
Click to expand...

If you want to get into programming and web quickly then I'd reccomend wordpress and php.
Wordpress is the fastest growing CMS out there which means people are using it which means they need to customise them which means higher possibility of jobs.

Learn php from the php.net manual. and worpress, read the Wordpress codex
 
rward said:
If you want to get into programming and web quickly then I'd reccomend wordpress and php.
Wordpress is the fastest growing CMS out there which means people are using it which means they need to customise them which means higher possibility of jobs.

Learn php from the php.net manual. and worpress, read the Wordpress codex
Click to expand...

Thanks, I will try that, is there an ebook out there on this?
 
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