I have been going around for so many months now trying to pick up and understand this PHP stuff but I get as far as arrays and other basic PHP functions like includes etc then I just seem to hit a brick wall. I think I need to stop wondering to all these different places getting different tutorials on useless stuff etc and make things simple and stick to one resource. My main question is this, if I just user Notepadd++, PHP.net and my PHP enabled server is that gonna be a good idea? I am not quite sure if PHP.net is the most friendly way of learning it or not. Any comments on this are much appreciated.
I think w3schools.com is the best place to start from the beginning if you want to install local php server then try www.easyphp.org I suggest learn HTML then CSS then JavaScript and at last PHP am not a programmer , I have very little knowledge in php because I didn't go on in learning it as I don't have either time or energy to keep going but when I tried to learn php one day I found that W3School is the best place to start
IMO, as a person who feels like I'm finally getting a good grasp of it let me say php.net is where I always go to look something up. Their examples leave a little to my liking but I can usually muddle throught it. To address the other questions: For me I needed to get Apache and php running on my local machine before I started to learn anything. Browser open, page loaded, phpmyadmin in another window, script open in notepad2, make changes and see what happens. That is when I really started to get a handle on it. The xammp non- installer (my preference) version will install on your XP machine and let you do this without ever leaving the comfort of your desk. Running free scripts, seeing what they do and how they were written was far better for me than all the books. ????
php.net is a great research tool to find functions and see how they work etc., but it won't easily teach you the basics. Personally, I'd get a good book to help with the basics, then learn by doing.
agreed. php.net is the ultimate reference and you can figure most things out with it. What it lacks is a progression through topics. w3schools and tizag.com are good to start. Think its php-mysql-tutorial.com.com that has better (more up 2 date ) examples etc. One of the better sites is http://hudzilla.org/phpwiki/index.php?title=Main_Page . Would second the book idea but only if its your first language. And yes, a text editor, a web server and php.net will do the trick. Though I do advise getting experience working with "real" webhosts. Invariably something which works fine on the local computer will produce garbage on the WWW. Ideally, after you get past the real simple stuff, find a smallish database to work with and do the basics: view, add, delete etc. That should keep you busy for a coupla weeks at least. if you need a DB just drop me a PM.
php.net is good for reference as it provides examples. I would recommend you use a good php IDE like phpDesigner, it has built in manuals, as you type a function it suggests some and gives parametres, so that you don't have to go to php.net for reference.
PHP.NET is not a recommended place for beginners. It is for improvisation of beginners. Beginners should focus on getting the code to work, rather than neat coding. Once they can get basic code to work, then they should seriously think about coding practices, function efficiency, return value interpretation, etc!
Subscribe to the RSS feeds of personal blogs written by developers, a LOT of them. Developers tend to vanish from their blogs from time to time without notice, but when they do post it's usually something you can learn from. One of my favorite non-developer feeds, well, technically it's a developer feed, but not for a single person, anyway, the feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/ZendDeveloperZone Scanning through the php.net quickref for function names that interest you never hurts, that's how I found out about a lot of functions I use today. I used to use Notepad2, being on Lunux now I use gedit though, which I suppose is pretty close to Notepad++ as far as basic editing goes.
Yea, php.net is good for beginners. But in my opinion w3schools.com is best to learn any language for beginners. give it a try... and share your findings with us.