So new to this

Qwisatz_Haderac

Just started doing web design approx. 3 months ago.
I'm actually an art/animation student and the Insurance agency I work for said "hey wanna design a website?" So Ive been spending my days fumbling through web pages trying to find ways to accomplish my tasks. With the help of a few tutorials, Ive written some small php scripts to interact with forms.

Now the company I work for wants an employee calendar. There's no qeustion it can be done and there are great scripts Ive found online for calendars. but they want employees to be able to check how man sick days theyve taken and have left. From what I understand something of that sort would require a database such as mysql. but there are many problems with organizing something of that magnitude for 70 employees and I barely even know php. What steps would anyone here reccomend I take to gain a more solid foundation for understanding all these languages? Are there any books that are especially good? Any information is greatly appreciated.

chr158

If you visit www.sitepoint.com and search for the Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL, this guy is great and the book is cheap to buy online. Kevin Yank guides you through step by step from installing mysql and php and writting very basic SQL.

Another good one is the SAMS Teach Yourself PHP in 24 hours - amazon.co.uk or amazon.com. Covers the basic and goes on to some more difficult and complex stuff later on.

By the end of those you will be wondering what you were bothered about.

The PHPBuilder site is very good as well and the staff here certainly know there stuff and are very helpfull.

Hope This Helps and Good Luck!!

theeper

I think the first step in learning PHP is to learn HTML very well. You should be able to write basic HTML from memory, this makes it easier to write and debug PHP scripts.

This site has been very helpful in my learning as is the php manual at php.net. There are plenty of articles on various subjects here as well as this awesome forum.

Likewise, devshed, webmonkey and others on the net offer some pretty good tuts.

Here is a list of PHP books that might help you.

http://www.php.net/books.php?type_lang=PHP_all