Anybody have a good site/book they would recommend for someone just starting out learning PHP?? I know html, but since I am dealing alot in wp now I really need some basic PHP learning Thanks Cindy
To Learn PHP there are many resources available online, I would suggest you to check out http://www.w3schools.com it really provides good resources to start out learning PHP
Tizag has an excellent - and well explained - guide which is also free, so you might also want to take a look there and work through the examples they show. http://www.tizag.com/phpT/
if you know what you want to do just look on http://php.net they can give you the command and how to use it
php.net is the resource. This is the best walkthrough that I have found on the internet. http://www.tuxradar.com/practicalphp
Just one more advice. Installing PHP, w3schools way, is typical. Try to go for a Pre Configured install kit, XAMPP.
The site above is pretty good as a reference to many things, but just remember as with everything in computers, what one site says shouldn't be regarded as gospel. Programming is more about having a basic set of tools and then being able to use them to achieve the result, so if you give 10 people the same tools (PHP in this case) and a task you'll get 10 ways of doing it....most of which will be right. As for loading it locally - that's certainly the cheapest way although personally I always run scripts from a server then you know it'll work on whatever server operating system you're using (Windows, Linux, *nix, FreeBSD etc). Or if you want a good crash course, try learning Perl first...then PHP suddenly looks a whole load simpler. Trev
I would go with W3Schools or Tizag (which are suspiciously similar), they both have great tutorials for beginners and cover many things (like file uploads, ajax, etc...)
I recommend PHP 5/MySql Programming for the Absolute Beginner. I had that book and i've learn alot from it.