learning php

[TheGiantPeach]

well ive decided to go ahead and learn php. i was just wondering if any of you had any idea where to start and any helpful sites or whatnot.

thanks a lot in advance.

peace.

/swd

[moneybagsxp]

www.php.net/manual

[TheGiantPeach]

thanks!

[martinator]

what i did to learn php is bought a book on php and i uploaded the files to a server that has php installed and it worked

[kryptondog]

At 3/10/02 12:41 AM, somewhatdamaged wrote: well ive decided to go ahead and learn php. i was just wondering if any of you had any idea where to start and any helpful sites or whatnot.

thanks a lot in advance.

peace.

/swd

Yeah, one of the good things about PHP (besides being fairly easy to learn compared to most scripting languages) is that there's a lot of online resources available to help you out with learning/understanding it.

If you don't have access to a good webserver with PHP and MySQL support, a good idea might be to download PHP Triad, which is basically an auto-installer for Windows that puts Apache (the actual webserver software), PHP, MySQL (databasing software that usually goes hand-in-hand with PHP), Perl (another popular scripting language), and phpMyAdmin (which lets you easily manage MySQL). Once you've got that on your PC, all you have to do is double-click on the Start Apache shortcut from the Start>Programs>PHPTriad menu, open up your web browser, and go to http://localhost/. To add files, simply put or create them in the htdocs folder of your apache folder. Say you make a script called helloworld.php and stick it in the htdocs directory. In your browser, go to http://localhost/helloworld.php and it should show up correctly. In essense, you turn your computer into a webserver. This is very good for testing scripts on-the-fly, and much easier than uploading them to a website.

You can download PHP Triad from here.

www.webmonkey.com has some good PHP tutorials, though they're not very comprehensive. www.phpbuilder.com has a shitload of them, but most are pretty advanced.

If I were you, I'd shell out the money for a good PHP book; you'll thank yourself for it later on (I'd recommend the "PHP4 Bible" published by IDG Books). Just make sure it has a section on MySQL. Look through the book a couple times, start trying out some simple programs, and you should start to pick up on the syntax pretty fast.

If you're looking for examples to look at, I'd recommend www.evilwalrus.com and www.planet-source-code.com (there's also hotscripts.com which has a bunch more scripts, but you have to download and unzip them, whereas most of the code on the other two sites is right there on the screen for you to see).

That's about it. Good luck.