try checking out hotscripts.com and just opening php scripts and learning from examples otherwise check out the manuals at php.net they have a lot of sample source code you can pretty much understand from the description and output
The best way to learn is to have a go.... download a script and like a forum and try modify it. From there try creating your own small scripts etc..
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=193698 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=174006 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=203773 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=224884 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=231386 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=205129 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=203969 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=176151 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=161609 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=165011 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=154129 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=48063 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=63317 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=143777 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=6179 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=111485 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=36342 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=11581 It's about time, Streety, I know. lol.
I learnt PHP in the toilets, years ago, 98' - 99', with a couple of books (wrox). Easy to learn, like HTML. I code by hand since. In 2 months, you get it all... Really cool to learn and to play with...
I learned a lot from dissecting phpBB. Probably not the best idea though haha. sitepoint.com have a lot of useful tutorials and what not for learning PHP and MySQL.
Read ppls code is the best way but it totaly depends how your mind likes to learn some people books r good, others reading code, copying out code and thats the most comon ways of learing
Go to http://www.flazx.com Here you will find best ebooks free to download. For PHP books this is the link. http://www.flazx.com/category11.php
^^ Google is going to lead you to tutorials/manuals, and not to comments and personal advices from people who've learned. Starting a thread is way more helpful than Google in this case. However, searching this forum would have helped...
A good book is: PHP 5.0 from Peter Kassenaar ( I tought it was also in English, 've read it in Dutch...)
The whole "Read the manual" is bogus in my opinion unless you have a very sound knowledge of programming in the first place. And/or you have some experience in PHP already. I refer to it regularly, but primarily to find functions I forget the name of or to find one that does something inparticular. You might be in the situation where you don't even know what a function is, and php.net isn't going to teach you that in my opinion. Go here: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/phpmysql1/ Kevin Yank's book has a free 4 chapter download. If you can walk through this... and I mean walk... seriously read it and reread teh areas you didn't comprehend, then purchase it. It will teach you the fundamentals for many of the projects you may want to do. Most projects are a simply a matter of adding, editing, and pulling data within a database to your website. You can learn this within 4 chapters of his book. From there I would recommend hopping into a small project like building a calculator (to learn more about variables) and maybe develop a small script to pull news from a database and post it on a website.
Sorry to the community, but the best way to learn PHP is to download php documentation from php[dot]net/docs.php (Select your language). As for me I prefer English in chm format. It is most complete version.