Posted by kenoli on 09/25/06 17:18

Fingolfin wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm thinking about learning PHP but don't know how to start, i have
> little Basic, Pascal and a bit more C++ experience, but now i want to
> extend that knowledge, go into web design, so i could make a PHP website.
>
> Where to start, how to begin, (if possible i would like to achieve a
> decent PHP level rather fast, a month of hard work or so?)

I found the following book to be invaluable for one specific reason.
It absolutely explains every step and every command and every operator
in every script addressed in the book.

I have found that nearly every other book I have read makes assumptions
about the reader already knowing stuff, or for some reason leaves many
lines in a script unexplained. Granted, the hours I have spent trying
to figure some of this out have often been valuable, but I think, in
the end the complete explanations in the book below got me up and
running faster than any book I have read.

The book is part of the "Visual Quickpro Guide" series:

"PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites" by Larry Ullman

There is an excellent forum that goes with the book that Larry responds
to regulary, as well. And, of course, as with most books these days,
downloadable scripts.

There are companion books by Ullman, one focused more on php with less
MySQL and one called "advanced" but I found the one above to cover all
of the territory and do it well, starting from the very beginning and
taking things a long way by the end.

It is not a book for you if you want to grasp object Oriented
Programming. It barely covers this.

Other books:

The book that finally gave me an undestanding of OOP is:

"PHP 5 Objects, Patterns and Practice" by Matt Sandstra (Apress,
publisher)

While it does covers the specifics of OOP in php it is really best for
the high level understanding it gives you of OOP and may be redundant
for people already familiar with it. But it does take quite a
sophisticated approach that might be of interest to anyone.

"PHP 5 Power Programming" by Guttmans, Bakken and Rethans

is of interest as at least one of the authors was a designer of php 5,
but it has more typos in it than I have ever seen in a book.

"PHP 5 Recipes: a Problem Solving Approach" by Babin, Goog, Keoman and
Stephans

provides some good basic stuff, taking each aspect of php into a bunch
of applications that illustrate them well. There were lots of
interesting discoveries for me in the book.

--Kenoli

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