First of all I would like to say hi to everyone. This is my first time here. Here is a little bio: I have always wanted to become a computer scientist and write programs, but since I can't really afford college yet i decided to embark on this self learning world. A friend suggested me to start making websites, and I said "why not?" So after taking my time to learn HTML and CSS (I already had some good photoshop knowledge). I started making some websites. It's been roughly 5 months since it all begun. Now I am in love with designing and programming. I want to be able to make web applications and in order to do that I need to learn PHP. I already have some basic knowledge of it like includes, get and post, but I am not confident nor do I know enough to write my own scripts. So I was wondering if you guys would be kind enough to point out good books for beginners or not so beginners... To learn PHP. I'm looking for something with good details because I really seek to understand and learn it. Thank you all.
Ok, I'll have some PHP resources that I post whenever someone asks for tutorials. http://devzone.zend.com/6/php-101-php-for-the-absolute-beginner/ http://tut.php-quake.net/en/index.html http://www.tuxradar.com/practicalphp Code (markup): First link is a very good beginners guide that will give you basic knowledge. You said that you already know some basics, so just fly over it. You might learn something new. Second link is also a beginners guide, but this one has some examples to work through (Guestbook, news script) Last link is a free eBook about PHP. Starts with the basics and expands to objects, forms etc. Well, these free resources should get you started. For real books, head over to amazon and read the customer reviews.
I always highly recommend physical books over online tutorials and eBooks. There's nothing better than learning from material you have in your hands. I've bought many O'Reilly books over the years, they're great. You can buy them second hand from Amazon very cheaply. By the way, as a graduated Computer Scientist I can tell you programming is only one very small part of the field. Buy books on: distributed systems, software engineering, systems analysis, networking and database structures, to name a few.
For me, tizag.com was the best place to start. Try it and you will love it, because it is for absolute beginners.