Best way to learn PHP?

United States
August 19, 2007 4:10pm CST
Some say e-books or online tutorials. But you see many people who say they learned just by looking at the code of scripts such as phpbb and just looked at what each thing did. So how did you learn or are learning?
7 responses
swaroop_sv2003
@swaroop_sv2003 (531)
• India
13 Sep 07
Well I am a php programmer by profession for the past 1 yr. I learned php by doing projects and going through others code as said above. I got the basic knowledge about php from some books and rest I developed myself. i am still in the process of learning through different projects. I feel the best method to learn any programming language is by doing some projects
StephenP
@StephenP (6)
• Canada
29 Sep 07
I agree, going through stuff that other people made, changing it and making your own based on it is the way to go. Syntactically, PHP is not at all difficult, it's just a matter of learning the functions and what they do.
nkadam
@nkadam (76)
• India
22 Aug 07
Php is very simple language,so you can learn it by refering online e-books,tutorials in both way.And if you learn enough functions in php then you can easily understand the big lines of others code.So nothing is difficult in php.If you want to learn start php from begining the learn book "Teach PHP in 24 Hours..".
jelena
@jelena (6)
• Serbia And Montenegro
4 Sep 07
Yes, you can learn it either way. However, I always like to have a paper book by my side when I'm learning new things in programming. Usually some books are written in a way so it teaches you to code through building a web project and in my opinion, the best way to learn is through example and practice. Online communities help a lot! Find good forum that you feel comfortable asking questions, and you are on the right track. Good luck!
gvvijaybhaskar
@gvvijaybhaskar (219)
• India
6 Oct 07
w3schools is a good site for tutorials i learn html javascript php css from that site it will e very use ful for beginners
praveenkalias1981
@praveenkalias1981 (95)
• India
7 Nov 07
I am using the books PHP 5.1 for beginners and PHP Bible. Use online resourses at php.net and w3schools.com. and after that do a project in php.
veepee
@veepee (16)
• Finland
25 Oct 07
I simply jumped on a small project after learning some of the absolute basics. Try to become friends with somebody who knows PHP, so he can help you.
osuchin
@osuchin (95)
• Philippines
5 Oct 07
Thank you for your advice.
babostwick
@babostwick (2036)
• United States
1 Oct 07
A combination of online tutorials, PHP books and looking at codes directly. For me, that helps the most because then I can visually see what I need to do and see if I got the code right. If I have it perfect, I'm good, if not then I have to go back and correct the errors and then put it back online again.