Where did you learn PHP?

I don't think I've actually learnt PHP more of a "just enough to get me by"... along with "PHP & MySQL for Dummies" plus numerous poorly written books, dropping occasional questions here at DP and using Google searches to find the site with the most specific answers, the best way for me was just to dive in and, yeah, lots of trial and error

 

It should be noted that many of the self-taught PHP programmers are actually pretty clueless and are nothing more than PHP hackers (like me )

I'm not picking on anyone here...but I have seen some pretty lousy self-procliamed PHP experts.

 

Thanks for all of that (once again). It seems like a lot of people used a book for learning in the beginning. I do hope the one I ordered will be good =\ It seems everyone used a different book to recommend!

Thanks.

 

This is indeed truth. Thats where i learned 90% from. The other 10% percent was from modifying some basic php files and learning the syntax from them.

 

I learned from a book called "Creating Dynamic Web Pages Using PHP & MySQL" by David Tansley. It's (I think) a really great book, with examples of how things work and then applied examples at the end of each chapter (for example, you learn about creating files, then adding lines of text to the files, and at the end of that chapter you apply that knowledge into creating a simple textfile-based guestbook).

In HINDSIGHT, however ... some of the examples were off sometimes, possibly because of certain commands being deprecated, but mostly because the author wrote with Linux users in mind and I am on a Windows machine.

But thanks to handy ol' PHP.net, I learned to get around those problems

 

By editing the codes of scripts that i bought. Try and learn is the best way i guess. When you can't find the answer, use google and write that down. But before looking up, try to solve the problem yourself. It will help a lot.

 

for me its easier to learn from real example code which easy to found with google: "php script example +....+"

 

I learned programming from an old Future Basic book when I was like seven. I learned basic PHP from a book than got better when I started working for a company that I made it sound like I was very experienced to.

 

Being a s/w engineer, it is not so hard for me to learn PHP.

I downloaded and studied the php manual from php.net to learn the syntax and some extra functions in PHP.

 

I learned by reading books, and hacking other people's code.
For example, some of my experiences were with phpbb.

 

took it while I was in college, one of the best classes I had!

 

i learn from w3schools and forum like sitepoint. but most is people teach me one. never learn from book

 

Self taught.

I had a friend do some scripts for me way back. I then looked at them and used the web to see what he was doing, or I asked him. Once I got the hang of a few functions I wrote my own, which initially took ages due to the fact that i had to research further functions.

It has been a long haul, but worth it.

 

php.net

the search function is very handy because you can search for what you want to do and it will tell you how to do it.

dont fotget to use mysql.com as well, tons of useful stuff there...

 

did C and Java in college

took few minutes to pick up the syntax and few weeks for the little nuances

thanks to few books the php.net manual

yes anyone can pick up procedural PHP,

but without previous experience with Object Oriented programming it hard to learn how to write BIG APPLICATIONS that serve hundreds of requests every second using OO php5

the area of design patterns alone will keep you learning for weeks

 

IMO php is something that comes naturally as you master html, it's like the next step. A lot of it is really easy as long as you have someone who can answer your questions as you have them.

 

I've learned initially by making small changes to outsourced scripts, then as I learnt the hang of it I started doing increasingly difficult things
Then came the time when I would need reference like php.net, so I studied on those websites and made my programming more "academic" (with comments etc)

 

There we go

 

http://www.php.net

 

I learnt it from an E-Book ( I still have it ) and by doing a live project