Hi Guys, I am trying to learn php. and i read the lessons on w3schools.com(PHP Basic,PHP Advanced,PHP Database) and i am still not able to grasp my hands on it. I am learning it because i wanna know how to code scripts and by far i feel like i a still at point zero. I don't know what should i do next, how scripts are coded. Can you guys please help me? What do i have to do next to know how to code scripts? Thanks, Sayed
W3Schools sucks to some degree, but try this site, it was recommended by a pro coder: http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/627 Good luck!
Well I learned the basics of php from w3schools. After that I asked some friends if they needed any scripts written. I learned a dump truck load in no time doing that. If you get stuck with an error go to: phpfreaks.com and the guys there will be happy to help you out for free. Helped me for a while.
How i went about getting experience, was basically looking at scripts that other people had coded, i picked it up from there. I recommend that you learn about statements such as: if, elseif, while and explode etc. They're probably the most widely used statements within the PHP community.
I learned the basics from eBooks and continue to check up on sites like pixel2life.com and talkphp.com. Pixel2life.com is a tutorial site where you can find tutorials on doing various random things with PHP. It definetly helps teach you some logic to writing a script ( although you will find many tutorials that are garbage, but there is still alot to learn from poorly written scripts, as you will come to understand later ). Talkphp.com has some great articles, most of which are a bit more advanced, but many of the people there know PHP well and can offer you great help and opinions. I refer to them constantly when I have questions. When I first started out and knew PHP itself well, I still couldn't code anything good. I started by checking out the source in many open source projects, to see how they went about doing things. Most importantly, experiment and code things by hand, do not copy and paste, ever. Copy / Pasting will only impede your learning process because you don't absorb any of the information your using. I cannot even go into how important this is any further, just code and learn. The more you code, the more natural the logic will come to you. Writing a PHP script just required good logically written instructions ( for a good script atleast ). Practice, practice, practice. Don't expect to be coding something like Joomla your first year ( you might be able to, you might not be far from it in a year ).