Newbie looking for advices

[bloodlover]

Hello everyone. I want to start learning PHP for my general knowledge and for a possible job in the (maybe distant) future. I'm new at this though so I was wondering if I can learn this by myself, without a teacher.

I was thinking of picking up something like "PHP for dummies" and starting from there + tutorials. Any recommendations on this matter, maybe even some specific books and websites that are not outdated?

I have a lot of free time so a lot of studying is ok too, even if I have to learn something else before even understanding PHP.

Thank you. ^_^

 

[Markbnj]

Personally I think PHP may be somewhat on the wane in favor of Python or Ruby.

 

[GregGreen]

Personally I think PHP may be somewhat on the wane in favor of Python or Ruby.

I agree with you for the most part. They are both a lot easier to read as well. And I know a book to recommend "Learn Python the Hard Way."

On the other hand, a lot of the jobs out there that you would need to know Python and Ruby for require a harder CS'y knowledge base. A lot of jobs that might require PHP only need to it fiddle around in Wordpress or ModX. That said, I don't have any book recommendations. I have a couple on my shelf that I randomly picked up, but I haven't been able to get to them yet as they are farther down in my reading list than I can get to quickly 😛

 

[arnoc]

Have you checked out the Pratical PHP Programming guide here: http://bit.ly/JKkGl3

I'm attempting to learn myself and so far it's easy enough to follow and pick up on things. Best of all, it's free!

 

[bloodlover]

Thx for the replies and the link.

 

[wsaenotsock]

It really depends what your goal is. PHP isn't hard to learn, and a basic to intermediate knowledge of it is extremely useful IMO-- for general web development and tweaking. If you plan to be a web developer or plan to be using CSS/HTML on a daily basis or modifying CMS systems then PHP is really useful and still very widely used. It's also very widely supported, pretty much any webserver is fully compliant with PHP, so you can go in and write some custom script for someone's site and have it work easily. Most CMS's are using PHP still like Wordpress and Drupal. Now, in terms of designing back-end systems from the ground up, then it's probably getting outdated. Ruby seems to be the hot new thing for that.

So if you plan on being a web developer, then yes.


If you are more of an application programmer then no, maybe something else instead