Ask HN: Where is the best place to learn .php?

[apollo5]

I've tinkered with editing a line or two in wordpress, but I want to get proficient.

I found a couple resources via google:

http://www.w3schools.com/php/ http://devzone.zend.com/article/627

however, I am curious is the community knows of a better resource...for someone that learned best in school from hands on and personal attention as opposed to text and home work.

I am actively coding a project that involves Wordpress and a site built on the yii framework.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[DanielN]

I would simply say that if you've gone through w3schools tutorial then you know enough to just work on your project and use http://stackoverflow.com and http://php.net .

I found that one of the biggest hurdles for going from a complete beginner - just learning the basic elements of programming - to an intermediate beginner - starting to be able to figure things out for yourself - is figuring out how to get answers to your questions online.

Knowing enough syntax and nomenclature to phrase your questions to google is no easy feat when you're first starting out. My main suggestion, other than "just try", would be to start reading PHP related questions on Stack Overflow.

If you know what loops are, you know what an if statement is, and you know most of the basic request and response arrays built into PHP (see w3schools) then you're ready to build.

[apsurd]

What level would you say you are as a programmer? Are you a complete beginner? Have you done any previous projects?

I'll see if I can recommend some stuff based on what level you are. As some general advice I'd say to read the yii documentation and tutorials. This will help you gain context around the concepts of what the framework "stands for" and how it works. http://www.yiiframework.com/tutorials/

Also here are some beginner tutorials for codeigniter: http://codeigniter.com/tutorials/ You can look at these to learn the concepts of MVC.

Feel free to email me if you want. best of luck.

[ashconnor]

The OP asked where to learn PHP, not a bunch of frameworks.

[apsurd]

People dislike PHP because it's very easy to pick up bad habits and create poor code in PHP.

Adopting proper OO and MVC patterns from a well-made PHP framework will help OP become a much better programmer as apposed to a guy that can google php-scripts.

Also, the php frameworks above are certainly a lot less magicky than a framework like Rails which, for what it's worth, yes I agree is not the best way to learn ruby.

@OP I recommended you learn through a framework for good reason. Becoming a better php programmer means following good coding standars/patterns. People dislike php because its very easy to write bad code - I don't want you to write bad code.

[captn3m0]

tizag.com is a good resource, but if you are using yii, go through its documentation.