New to PHP - Best Resources for Ground Level PHP Learner?

As the title puts it, I am very to new to PHP and semi-new to HTML. I currently operate which I know can benefit from me having more knowledge in the basics of PHP.

Does anyone have good online or offline (videos, books, articles, anything) resources for completely new starters in PHP? I figured I would ask the forum with hopes of finding people who have been through what I'm going through and found resources that helped them.

Thanks.

 

Resource wise, i would look into online tutorials first, like:
http://www.tizag.com/phpT/
(so that you can get the basic syntax and a feel of the language)

then move up to videos on youtube, like:
http://www.youtube.com/user/thenewboston
(as they usually explain the code used quite well)

then progress to some books/E-books for a more detailed explanation. (to get a more in depth knowledge of the language):

download:
http://www.scriptit.tk/uploads/php5/PHP5.rar

And be aware of E-books you find online, some are outdated and reference to PHP4, where a lot of functions have been deprecated and so will cause you to learn useless functions.

Lastly, use the following site as your new "bible":
http://php.net/

If you dont know what a function does, then it will be explained on there and with examples most of the time.

 

I found w3schools and tizag to be most useful personally, there's an extensive library of information on practically any problem or question you have online for matters which aren't covered on both of those websites, so you should be able to find help on google for matters not covered on those websites.

 

Scriptsdesk has the collections of best php tutorials,tips and programming books.

 

Thank you both for the resources. This is exactly what I was looking for -- Thanks again!

 

I would recommend that you work through http://devzone.zend.com/6/php-101-php-for-the-absolute-beginner/, in my opinion it's one of the BEST free courses for learning PHP for complete beginners.

 

you should set up a local webserver such as XAMPP and start testing codes on your own computer. it's great for "sandbox" testing your first php codes.

 

Have you tried the lynda.com PHP courses? That is where I started and I really enjoyed them (video tutorials).

 

Why do you want to know it? You want to be a software engineer, or you just want to edit something in your site?

If you want to be a SE, a book "for dummies" is pointless. You should first start with a really powerful OO language (like Java), with algorithms, programming methology, quality code, etc. Thus you will be really good software engineer.

But if you just want to be the next poor programmer (who doesn't know the difference between byte and short data types) or you want just to edit a website, then yeah, start with the "for dummies" book.

 

Except php.net, this is the best tutorial I've found online.

http://www.tuxradar.com/practicalphp