Help!!! Beginner in PHP

gg2007mva

Hello,

I am beginner in web development and i need your help how I can start. What is the appropriate books, what IDE i can use, i must learn HTML 5 AND CSS

Best Regards,
Mary

planetsim

Yes HTML 5 and CSS would be beneficial to learn, if you want to output the work you are doing nicely. If so I'd learn these first, CSS can be tricky to understand and trying to learn too much all in one heap will seem quite daunting. As for books on HTML and CSS I am unsure, Ive never used any to actually recommend, however there are numerous tutorials and articles on this, a quick Google search can assist with that, one word of advice try to avoid w3schools in this, they have no relationship with W3C who are the standards body.

Again lots of resources online for learning PHP, back in the day when I was learning there was an abundant of information online and forums such as this to guide me. Today there is probably a lot more, if you want a book, this has been asked numerous times please search the forum. In terms of what to learn I would firstly learn the fundamentals

Variables
Data types (string, int, etc) - You'll probably cover this when learning about variables.
Control Structures if, if/else, if/elseif/else, switch
Functions
String Manipulation
File Reading and Writing
Developing with multiple source files (include, require, include_once, require_once)
User Data handling. GET requests with query_string, Form Handling, Cookies, Sessions.

I would try and master these concepts before going on to what I consider more advanced topics such as

Data Validation
Databases
Object Oriented Programming (OOP)
Frameworks (There are so many out there)
Understanding how PHP Interpreter works to get the most out of it (Memory Management / Garbage Collection, etc)

dalecosp

There are many discussions of editors and IDE's in these boards. It tends to become a "religious flame war" at times ... well, kinda, anyway. I'd look them up, and use your search engine of choice ... install a few, and use what you like.

Choice would be depending on your OS, personal preferences, hardware power, and workflow/business processing needs.

Here's a list of some of the IDE's and editors available:

IDE's: Komodo, NetBeans, Zend Studio, Aptana, Eclipse, PHPStorm, Nusphere ...

I use NetBeans, but it's RAM-intensive.

Smaller "Featureful" Editors: SciTE, Komodo Edit, CodeLobster, TextWranger, Notepad++, gVim, PSPad ... there are dozens.

I use Notepad++.

Very Small/CLI Editors: Notepad, vi, pico, kate, nano, ed(1) ... 😛

I can use vi, but I generally install nano on a server if I can.

HTH,

sneakyimp

Strictly speaking, you can code PHP without knowing any HTML5 or CSS (you could simply have your scripts output JSON or CSV to some client), but if you do know them, you are going to be a lot more useful to yourself and others.

As for IDE, I prefer Eclipse. It's been my experience that an IDE has many features that are really helpful in writing code, but that setting up PHP so that you can debug your code, stepping code execution one line at a time, is a really tricky thing to get running.

Not sure about books. The internet has a lot of really helpful documentation, tutorials, etc. If I were you, I'd pick something I want to try and accomplish and start searching for tutorials or asking specific questions on a forum like this one.

gg2007mva

Thank you very much all of you for your help. I didn't tell that I am developing in .net and I have the knowing of variables, data types e.t.c. I would like to move in web development and for that reason I am asking your opinion for IDE and books.

Weedpacket

You might find Phalanger interesting.