i personally learnt from jumping in at th deep end and gradually understanding it.. dont reccomend it!
Why dont you try out and test the PHP codes out? Read a ebook or get some text books from the libary.
That is a terrible way to learn PHP. Studying a contact form then a blog script? Are you even serious right now? What you should do it go over to W3Schools to learn the basics. Then you should check out or buy a PHP book or two and look through it for a week or two. Next you should study some simple scripts and try to re-create them a different way. Now you should have a basic idea of how to code PHP and how it works. So when you need to use a script think of how you would do it and then refer to http://php.net to find the appropriate functions or you can build your own functions. That is how I learned, I have been using PHP for over a year and still wouldn't consider myself an expert.
There are plenty of websites you may want to look at: www.phpvideotutorials.com/ - Video www.killerphp.com/ - Video www.w3schools.com/PHP/DEfaULT.asP - Text www.tizag.com/phpT/ - Text http://devzone.zend.com/article/627 - Text http://www.goodphptutorials.com/ - Text And obviously, whenever you need something: www.php.net/ I've never learned PHP from a book, I've read dozens of tutorials and have read dozens of scripts. I'm not sure if it's enough if you've never learned a programming language before. I had learned C before from two books as well as VB 6 so I found it easy to learn PHP.
php.net is very useful with many examples for each function. You should get an ebook, a simple php script and start reading the script and understand it
I have learned php just by using it. When it comes to book, in my case, I didn't follow any particular one. Used php.net and w3schools for many times for function references. Recently came across another site, which seems to be good for step by step learning. The book is organized as chapters and all steps have good examples. Hope this will help newbies to learn php.
If you like watching and learning then yeah phpvideotutorials.com is great. What's more, as you're learning you are actually seeing the code in action. I learnt the hard way from online tutorials, and reading forum posts such as the others in the section here, and seeing general problems that people had and how the experts corrected them. From there I just built up my knowledge by trying different websites, making blogs, forums, price comparison websites, shopping carts etc. Tinkering with code is great fun and also a great way to learn. I like the suggestion above on using the mailing list as well. I think it would be a great way to see common problems (both simple and more advanced)
this question was asked long ago by others! below thread has some information... http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1077112
w3schools is a great place. But what you really need to do is to come up with a project and find the info piece by piece. It will help you to learn alot faster than going through a structured "class".
Spend a month learning the basics from books or online resources. Write some basic scripts as you do this. Next, think about a project you would like to build and work your way through it no matter how long it takes. Keep the project simple enough so you can accomplish it. The best way to learn php is by working on projects. You may want to consider setting up the apache web server on your computer and installing php and mysql (find tutorials that show you how to do this). Then you can build php projects on your local machine and it will give you some insight on how things are setup.