How long does it take to learn PHP?

Ok let me divide and specify the question:
1) How long would it take to learn to fix little things and to do minor websites when you cant/ dont want to pay anybody for that;
2) How long would it take to be hired with this skill ( let's say on a contract, at whatever rate that is current-- $20 per hour, $4 per hour, whatever )
3) How long would it take to be in top 5-10 % of those who know PHP already?
I obviously mean in the average, for an average guy, etc. No need to bring up idiots and geniuses.

 

That still doesn't help. Every individual case is completely different. An average doesn't really exist and even if it did no one would know it.

 

tatally depends on u

 

Step 0) Learning programming. Anywhere from a couple of months to a few years, depending on you. Regardless of the language you're going to write programs in, if you don't know programming, you're not going to be able to do programming, even just little fixes. Unless you're talking about fixes as simple as syntax errors. Changing what a program does - even just a little - requires that you understand how and why it's doing what it's doing now.

(The programming code of a website is no different than the programming code of a word processor or a weather model - it's a computer program. PHP is "scripting" - that just means that it doesn't get compiled before it's run. Most of the time. There are PHP compilers, and you can write a PHP program that runs on a desktop.)

1) Once you're a programmer, learning PHP syntax is pretty trivial (it looks as if it's designed to be.) Maybe a couple of weeks.

But fixing someone else's code is actually more difficult than writing your own. You first have to understand what he was doing. And if your style of logic is a lot different than his, it's sometimes easier and faster to just write the whole thing from scratch.

2) Most of the job listings I've seen in the past 10 years require at least 2 years of paid experience. That means a job in which you're allowed to help the programmer at first, eventually being allowed to work on your own. Then 2 years of that. So anywhere from 2 years to never.

To earn $40/hour or more (the going rate for an experienced programmer in a large city)? 5-10 years of experience.

3) Ive only been writing code for 39 years, and I don't consider myself to be in the top 5%-10%, so maybe 50 years?

Or as BRUm said, it's different for each person.

Another consideration. If you're right-brained (artistic) you'll never learn programming to the point that you'll be worth anything (even to yourself) as a programmer. It takes a left-brained person to be a good programmer. (And a left-brained person will never be a good designer - that takes a dominant right brain.) If you don't already see everything in life as a problem to be split into its logical steps, maybe programming, other than fooling around with it, isn't for you.

 

Rukbat, my hat is off to you. Very fulfilling and satisfying answer. Thanks a bunch.

 

Interesting take on the left-right brain Rukbat. My fiancée is an artist and I'm a software dev. so that puts things into perspective

 

Yes, interesting.

As an ambidextrous person with not much PHP experience I soon realized I can often come up with a more creative solution regarding MySQL queries than most experienced programmers. We could say I'm not that far left or right myself, but close to the golden middle. My assumption is that you need creativity to find a solution, and left brain to actually code it and make it work.

It's an assumption I based on my own experience, it may or may not be true for others. But anyway, I think we'd all agree it takes a bit of creativity for problem solving, and often that's what coding is about. I can personally never be a top PHP programmer but when it comes to isolated problems, I can sometimes find a better solution.

Right brain sees the big picture, left brain sees details.

 

According to my experience: Everythings is basically depends upon the time that you will devote on the PHP practice and i have great experience with onlinephptutor.com to learn with the high skilled teachers for the online classes and they will guide you better if you would like to interact with them.

 

For php we should also have some basic knowledge of HTML.

 

pls Can you tell me about which version using best in php???????????

 

It depends on your background and skill level. If you are completely new to scripting and programming it can take around 100 hours (50days) of learning.

 

The simple answer is

A LIFE TIME

You will never be able to know everything and there will always be something you can learn and improve you skills.

 

Thank you, I will consider this, but first I want to break a few spears of my own

 

I'm sorry but it's my obligation to do this: http://www.w3fools.com/. I know that post is old, but a professional recommending w3schools as a reference guide? :S (You can thank my programming mentor for this ^^ )

edit* I guess if I'm rez'ing an old thread for my first post I might as well contribute..

It took me a couple days to learn the basics of PHP in a way that could be applied to practical / real world situations by using a Lynda course called PHP with MySQL Essential Training by Kevin Skoglund. When I took the course MySQL was actually already deprecated in PHP and I decided to make the minor adjustment over to MySQLi right away before I even had a chance to use my new found knowledge. Coming in to PHP I had only experience in HTML4 and CSS, and was just starting to get into HTML5. I think having the basic knowledge of HTML is helpful for learning PHP, but HTML is not technically a programming language, and there is definitely a steeper learning curve to PHP. HTML knowledge doesn't make it a "walk in the park" so to speak, but it's a good start before diving into a server-side language imo...

 

You posted this on August 4, 2012, and I hope you have made some progress in learning PHP. I am a retired instructor of teachers (means I have studied the subject of cognative development, AKA learning). I can go into learning styles that facilitate retention and host of other silly tech terms used by educators to talk about learning, but the bottom line 'common sense' answer is this:

You always get what you put into learning. This includes the knowledge or skills you bring to the table of learning. Motivation has been proven to be a better indicator of how fast and how well a person learns as long as you have average IQ. Also, the more avenues of exposure to a subject increases the chances of successful learning. This is why the suggestion given by many within this thread to 'get a project' is the best advice. What a project will do is expand the opportunities for your brain to process the new material in an efficient way (e.g., only reading a book, watching or listening to a lecture, taking comprehensive notes, the 'hands on' practicing of new concepts via pertinent homework, etc.).

 

I had to build a e-commerce site using PHP for one of my university modules. I used multiple video tutorials as was able to pick things up pretty quickly. One tip I can pass on it to use a good tool i.e. Notepad++ or Eclipse PHP, really helps you pick out errors

 

Depends on how analytical your mind is and how well disciplined you are. Within 30-90 days you can be coding pretty decent stuff but will need to focus a lot on the Notices, warnings and errors you get. They will teach you what NOT to do. Never hide them... debug them. By 30 to 90 days, I mean like 3+ solid hours a day.

 

PHP Storm or Sublime notepad++ with no plugins would be a decent introductory program to help you get used to the syntax by writing everything out, but once you are more familiar with PHP using higher grade IDE's is invaluable.

 

It's now almost 3 months that I've started web development with absolutely no knowledge about PHP, MySQL, Javascript and JQuery at all. I just knew something like one or two common tags of HTML. That is all. I started to check various resources like codecademy, w3schools, and many others that was just for fun at the beginning and I put some codes here and there .. I installed wamp and started to flirt around the interface. Then I thought I want to go ahead and build a simple site with just 3 pages that showed advertisement of some kind. It was so difficult to remember the functions and how they worked at the start but now after almost 4 months, it ended up with a full package of professional looking web site offering services in 8 different categories with complete login and registration system, considering security measures like XSS and SQLinjection and also because it uses non-eng characters in reading and storing various kinds of data into mysql database, I needed to handle tricks and methods to overcome additional issues with getting and putting data back into the db tables, I can say I ended up learning quite lots of things since then.
I don't believe I've come so far but I did it and I'm so comfortable now working with several languages at the same time now. I don't claim I can build another Drupal now but I can handle lots of things, at least build a small shopping site with a full pack database supporting it. I'm still learning specially Javascript since it seems quite lot of precision to be needed in coding and it looks like a much more vastly capable programming language to me than I'd expected before. Actually I hated Javascript and I thought it's kind of luxury but now everything is different.

Go ahead, don't think about your worries and fears. Everything will come to you when you need. When you are in the way, you'll get over enything that comes in your way. Don't think of ir as a job or real project, think of it as a fun and amusement. you'll get to learn bit by bit hear and there and someday you look and see you are so ahead you couldn't imagine before.

Good luck!

 

honestly speaking, If you have good knowledge in languages like C or C++, C#, then basics of PHP is quite simple. One thing yoy can do there are plenty of PHP blogs in the web. Read a couple of them regularly. You can do it within a couple of days.