Any PHP developers here?

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Permalink Reply by Andrew Robitaille on August 27, 2007 at 1:41pm

Hi Jesse. Learning a bit of php is on my to-do list as well. I'm coming to this with complete ignorance; the only programming I've done is html. I'd love to find a good resource that explains php in kindergarten terms. Best of luck mate.

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Permalink Reply by Jesse Thorstad on August 27, 2007 at 1:51pm

Andrew,

We sound a lot alike; I am pretty good at HTML/CSS. The very best book I ever found on that subject was the Head First HTML with CSS book.

I was on their website a year ago, and they said they would be releasing a PHP/MySQL book by last Christmas, but alas, it's still not out!

I have Larry Ullman's PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Website, and it's pretty good (an he's a Mac guy!), but it doesn't start at quite the beginner level I think I need.

So, I've still not found the perfect book for me. Of course, this topic will take a lot of time to play with an learn, and I've not had the chance to give it the time it's required.

Thanks for the reply!

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Permalink Reply by James Folkestad on August 27, 2007 at 4:44pm

I am in the same boat... I am very interested in learning about PHP. Andrew, I posted a similar post (request for help) to yours on the Ning Developers site. Here is a RSS feed to that post and responses. Note that they give several references / resources. I have not had time to look a these... If and when you check these resources please let me know via this thread discussion / Forum how they look.

http://networkcreators.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=492224%3ATopic%...

If you have problem getting to this RSS feed let me know.

Thanks,

Jim

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Permalink Reply by Yancy Gunhammer on August 27, 2007 at 4:40pm

Hey Jesse,

I am going through the same journey as you. I have setup a Joomla page, Moodle and started a Wordpress multiuser blog site. We are an apple mainly school with Windows server and we just got in a bunch of apple servers so I am really excited. I have the same book as you php amd mysql for dynamic websites by Larry Ullman it is a great resource. I go to a few website also.

Starting with the http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp

http://us3.php.net/tut.php

They both very much beginner level stuff.

Yancy G

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Permalink Reply by Rick Biche on August 27, 2007 at 8:29pm

Jesse-I don't know that I can help, well, probably I can't but I would be interested in the same thing. I did take an online class a while back through www.ed2go.com/unh which was ok and gave me some of the real basics such as making a simple form, submitting it to the database and quering back out. I hadn't any prior php, database or programming experience outside of html/css so it was all quite new. The courses are cheap like $89 I think, but that is substantially more than a book. As a result of the course I can read the php in joomla or wordpress and generally understand enough to know what might happen if I delete something but that is about it. I have a number of ideas for using the php/mysql at school to help automate some different things. I suggested this to our tech guys but they are just too overwhelmed at this point to even think of creating anything. I guess I'll keep an eye on this thread.

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Permalink Reply by Jesse Thorstad on October 25, 2007 at 2:32pm

Rick,

I'm enrolled in the ed2go.com class, and am enjoying it a lot! We're into the third lesson, and I think it will give me what I need to kick-start my learning.

THANKS for posting that.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Kassissieh on August 27, 2007 at 11:04pm

Do you typically learn from book references? I have learned the most programming from examining open-source code of leading applications. I find that all programming languages have common constructs, and I pick up a lot of strategies and techniques from existing code.

Richard

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Permalink Reply by Jesse Thorstad on August 28, 2007 at 5:45am

Richard,

Learning HTML and CSS worked that way for me. It came rather easily.

For whatever reason, PHP has been much harder for me to learn just by looking "under the hood". There are too many concepts for me to grasp without being told WHY it's being done that way.

Thanks for the replies here, folks. I hope more come this way, and that we can perhaps start a little community of learners.

Jesse

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Permalink Reply by Yancy Gunhammer on August 28, 2007 at 9:58am

Another source that I have found to administer php it look pretty cool. I just loaded it on one of my apple server is Php myadmin. A tool to create, edit and query you my sql data base.

Here is the link

http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/index.php

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Permalink Reply by Jesse Thorstad on August 28, 2007 at 10:59am

Yancy,

I enjoy phpmyadmin a lot! It make s database work convenient when I'm away from the office.

On my desktop, I've fallen in love with CocoaMySQL. If you have a Mac desktop, you should check this out. It's excellent.

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Permalink Reply by Joaquim Lopes on August 28, 2007 at 11:25am

I also love CocoaMySQL but also use MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser that can be downloaded from the mySQL's site.

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Permalink Reply by Joaquim Lopes on August 28, 2007 at 11:22am

OK, I see a lot of Mac people here which makes me feel at home (I have three Macs one of them running OS X Server). Now for resources. I have Hugh E. Williams & David Lane's book Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL (O'Reilly) - it was one of the first books I bought about PHP and it has saved me some times. My salvation book for mySQL is Paul Dubois' book MySQL Cookbook (also from O'Reilly). For both mySQL and PHP I also use the excelent documentation on mySQL's site and php's site whenever I'm on a hurry.
Macromedia used to have some good start articles about PHP and they must be somewhere on Adobe's site but I haven't looked. A good resource for PHP code and snippets is PHP resource index.
Hope this helps.

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