How long does it take to learn PHP?

If you're referring to me, I don't know anyone who considers 40 years of experience to be "inexperienced", other than you.

A lot of incorrect examples, and easy to understand outdated methods.

I suppose that's why you consider yourself "experienced" - because you don't yet know how much there is to programming and web development that you don't know, and you aren't interested in increasing your knowledge.

As has been said before, some people make this site "digital pointless".

 

ive been at it for 5 years and still learning, u dont stop learning

 

Took me a weekend to create my first PHP website. I already had programming experience from before though.
Going on about 6 years atm, and I still learn; maybe not a lot of PHP, but programming generally.
The art of programming is a never ending study

 

I learn php/mysql while I study in graduate since 2005. I bought a book php/mysql and then I try to write and improve the coding myself.

 

The first programming language I learnt was PHP, although I eventually moved on to C#. Learning something depends on the person, nothing is easy / hard, it ultimately depends on the person, while it could take a person 1 hour to understand OOP it could take another 100 hours. The main thing here to note is stop focusing on how long it will take and just learn, I can guarantee after you spend some time with a language you like, you will learn at a much faster pace and enjoy it a lot more.

Also it is good to have a mock project, this way you can apply your knowledge to that project and visualise when to do things as you learn. Depending on your resources sometimes you may not be learning because the author of the article / book does a terrible job of explaining so have multiple materials of something, preferably books.

 

Can i help you? please into http://sources68.com/php/ and learn php

 

PHP is easy to learn, however the language itself is ugly compared to other general purpose programming language such as python and ruby.

 

There's both good and bad things with PHP. But you can create pretty "good looking" code, if you know what you're doing.

 

You beat me to it. +1

I has taken me around 5 years, including 3 years of university studying, to get to the point where I'm comfortable in my abilities to achieve just about anything that can be done with the language and ensure it's properly structured, secure and efficient.

There are countless people who consider themselves PHP programmers because they can knock up a half-arsed dynamic website.

 

I would say if you had an idea of something you wanted to build and you were really determind to do it, you could learn a good grasp of PHP in a month. But you need to eat, sleep, and dream PHP.

Took me 5 years at least to consider myself and expert. And I still have an issue saying expert since its always changing and I haven't played with every part of PHP. I have been called and expert so I guess I get to have that title.

I would go get a PHP book or subscribe to lydia.com and develop an application you want to develop. Or better yet the way most of us have started, go grab a open source application like WordPress, ZenCart, OsCommerce and build features, make changes. I got my start as a programmer because I had an idea to build something on the net but I didn't have the money to hire someone and I didn't have a clue about programming. So what was there to do? Learn code and develop the idea.

 

you're looking at a couple of days to get the basics down. But you really just have to have practical uses for it. And learning PHP helps you understand other languages.

 

javascript has some of the basic ideas in it as well.

 

How long does it take to learn PHP? Depends on your approach.

If you want to learn the entire language, then you have to start with basics and then read books, and more books, only to find that there's something new you don't know.

It's better to focus on developing your own code (which made you want to learn PHP in the first place). That way, you'll learn only the necessary things which are related to your code.

I have personally used the 2nd approach, learning only on a need-to-know basis, and it's fast. Then you grasp the concept and you can add more things as you need them.

Let me put it this way. You want to display an image using PHP. You can either learn only that piece of code, and do it in 5 minutes, or you can read three books, only to find out that you don't really remember which code you're supposed to use.

 

Code writing and learning is an ongoing process.. It will never end. As soon as you start thinking that I have learnt, you find something new. To learn it, you spend another night writing program just to realize in the morning that there is a pre-defined function already to do this. Good luck

 

I think it wont take long if you know other web technologies and some programming knowledge of other languages but if you dont have knowledge of other languages then it will take more time

 

Ya w3school.com is the best option to learn, I can used it as a online tutor and can understand easily. It also describe with the examples also by which it is easy to get.

 

W3school is good for quick reference but certainly not for a tutoring. Look at the website w3fools.com
w3schools claims professional web developers use WYSIWYGs and the site even has a disclaimer! Why people don't use certified and official websites for standards, like opera web standards curriculum or even w3c itself has a wiki based html repository.

 

It took me about a year of coding and practice to fluently learn the language, if you read tutorials and go head first into coding some actual sites you can learn a lot in a very short amount of time.

 

If you've learnt any programming language before, it will take about 1 week, if not, maybe 1 year to learn some basic things like variable, constant, loop...etc..

 

may be if u give only 3 hour per day then u learn php with in 45 days..................