[fleitz]

The problem is learning PHP actually makes you worse at PHP.

The only possible way to program PHP is to be pretty much ignorant of everything in which case PHP will actually do kinda what you wanted. If you learned PHP then either it's not actually doing what you think it's doing, or some config variable changed and would have done what you thought except it didn't, but don't worry just add some code to change that config variable for a while, and then change it back.

PHP is zen.

There is a story of a young, but earnest PHP student who approached his teacher, and asked the Master, "If I work very hard and diligently, how long will it take for me to learn PHP?"

The Master thought about this, then replied, "Ten years."

The student then said, "But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast. How long then?"

Replied the Master, "Well, twenty years."

"But, if I really, really work at it, how long then?" asked the student.

"Thirty years," replied the Master.

"But, I do not understand," said the disappointed student, "at each time that I say I will work harder, you say it will take me longer. Why do you say that?"

Replied the Master, "When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path."

[pallandt]

I think the big problem with PHP is the fact that you can find so many tutorials online still not having caught up with current practices, not just in terms of language updates or security, but in terms of software engineering. Not knowing any better and how to distinguish between quality learning material, newcomers will happily put into practice what they've learned on good 'authority' to be correct. Same applies for many books on PHP. There's one particular very prolific and popular author, whose PHP books are always revelled, yet if you read them, he's not actually teaching at a standard a lot higher than what you can find other places. You end up having to spend more time having to re-learn stuff and trying to forget bad approaches...one of the downsides of it being a language with a longer history that Ruby+Rails.

[smokingkipper]

Hi, this is very interesting to me as I am currently picking up PHP.

Can you point me to some resources which don't fall into the trap you highlighted?

[tokenizer]

Thank you dearly for this. What's your opinion on SSI?

[fleitz]

I'm not personally a huge fan of SSI, however, it's simple and understandable, and things do what you think they do.

What I like about it is clean separation, a few command for common things, and if SSI doesn't directly support what you want you just hand it off to another program.