Working up to PHP

Ascendancy

Hey guys. I am working my way up to PHP. I know some forms in HTML, and that is as far as in am in HTML. I am trying to start on Javascript, but all of the variables are confusing the hell out of me. Anybody have any pointers?

lucasrd

read tutorials and get a real project to practice with....

lozza1978

The best way to learn PHP is to use it everyday, Go to the tutorials section, find something your interested in, and follow the tutorial build the appliction, then start to modify it, you will soon learn PHP, and theres not alot to HTML,

I would spend more time on the PHP, the HTML will follow in suit,

A good few PHP tutorials can be found @
http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/PHP/1

If you need help with HTML/CSS tags... This is the site i use as reference..
http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp

Good luck

lozza

Ascendancy

Hmm..Should I learn CSS before I learn PHP?

ClarkF1

CSS is not a programming language, it's a language site layout and design.

It's client side, PHP is server-side, i.e. the files are processed on the server before being sent to the browser rather than the browser interpreting the file.

The way I learnt PHP was to find a script that does something you want to do and look at it, pick it apart, improve it etc.

I also set myself little projects........

I currently have for my personal use scripts that list my DVD collection with search facility and I can put in when I watch a DVD etc and a similar sort of thing for my DVD collection, as well as a website photo gallery script

Most of all don't be scared.........it may look daunting but once you get the hang of it you'll find it pretty straight forward.

Oh yeah, and the best piece of advice.......if you get totally stuck, don't hesitate to post here......we don't bite. I've had loads of advice from here, I'm a relative newbie having only been PHPing since March and on a totally amateur basis.

Houdini

To properly learn and use PHP you will need to set up a web server on your local machine or if not have a hosting site that has PHP. You can get Apache for free and then you would also need PHP which is also free. It would be of great help to have a dbms like perhaps MySQL also which is also free. If you are not real technical then I would highly suggest that you get an installation tool like XAMPP which you can download HERE or you could use WAMP which you can download HERE or if you have a MAC you could use MAMP which you can download HERE.

A great free book with plenty of examples that you can try out is Practical PHP Programming! This should give you a good start and then if you get stuck then return here and get solutions to your problems.

NogDog

Mastering HTML/CSS is not a prerequisite for learning PHP, and vice versa. However, mastering PHP without ever learning how to create valid, semantically meaningful, accessible, and cross-browser functional HTML/CSS pages can be quite a waste of time. (Creating a spiffy PHP script with lots of complicated functionality that ends up outputting malformed HTML that breaks on some browsers and which the search engines can't make anything out of is probably a lot of hours of effort down the tubes.)

PS: Word of caution, there are a lot of tutorials out there on the web that can teach you many bad habits (both in PHP and HTML/CSS). It may be worth your while to search out recent books (published within the last couple years) that are more likely to teach current best practices instead of 1990's era deprecated functions and techniques.

Merve

I would suggest that you start with an online tutorial. Looking at the PHP manual right from the outset can be very daunting, because, let's face it: the manual is confusing!

I used Webmonkey's introductory PHP tutorial, but it's probably not the best one to use because it assumes that register_globals is turned on, and doesn't give a thorough explanation of what functions are.

I would suggest that you find a tutorial that you're comfortable find. Try to find one that has been published recently and that will work with PHP 5.

About HTML/CSS/JavaScript: learn them. It's good for you. I learnt them before I learnt PHP and I wouldn't have understood PHP without a solid grounding in those 3. (However, I'm not an expert at any of these things, even though I've been into this stuff since 2001.) What NogDog said is right. HTML is the foundation for everything web. CSS is necessary to code good-looking pages. PHP is what you can use to make a static webpage dynamic. As far as I'm concerned, JavaScript is just the icing on the cake, but it is very useful nonetheless.

So that's just my 2 cents. If you're casually into PHP, it's probably not worth your while to purchase a book on the subject. But you'll certainly want to delve into a few tutorials. After a while, you'll be able to figure out stuff mainly from the manual.

Hope this helps!

Ascendancy

Houdini wrote:
To properly learn and use PHP you will need to set up a web server on your local machine or if not have a hosting site that has PHP. You can get Apache for free and then you would also need PHP which is also free. It would be of great help to have a dbms like perhaps MySQL also which is also free. If you are not real technical then I would highly suggest that you get an installation tool like XAMPP which you can download HERE or you could use WAMP which you can download HERE or if you have a MAC you could use MAMP which you can download HERE.

A great free book with plenty of examples that you can try out is Practical PHP Programming! This should give you a good start and then if you get stuck then return here and get solutions to your problems.

I definetly need to get around to installing that.