[mcintyre1994]

I hate to discourage someone whose obviously a really practical learner but just a note that last I checked a fair amount of w3schools things on particularly php were a bit dodgy around security and dealing with now deprecated things.

Php has says to make things really insecure and unlike your book on Ruby which probably shows you the right way to do things there, w3schools doesn't tend to. It's not a huge deal while learning if you're a quick learner and don't get bad habits but it's worth being aware of and looking into if anything gets serious.

If you want a really over the top look at why some people don't recommend w3schools, check out w3fools.com

If you're looking for a solid php resource with a more modern and secure approach I'd recommend http://www.phptherightway.com

Overall it's probably just worth noting that wherever w3schools recommends something you wouldn't do in Ruby it's not because you should do that in PHP - and it'd be worth looking in your php book or other resources for the right approach in PHP.

[OGiR]

Thanks for the words of caution mcintyre. I am pretty new to all this, and my approach for learning outside of school is to just build things, and figure out the bits I don't know along the way. So when I need a quick reference to something, the w3schools tutorials are always a quick easy way to look at code snippets.

I have been spending a lot of time lately studying outside of school, but it can be difficult to know what to read, what to code, what to learn. So I appreciate the feedback from knowledgeable people very much.

I have seen that the pragmatic programmers write very good books that have great reviews so I will stick with them for sure. I will look a bit more critically at w3schools, though, and I will definitely check out the php site you recommended.

I would love to hear more advice from people in the industry on what I should be learning and how I should be learning. If you have any ideas about how I should work on more practical things outside of school to give me real world skills I would be grateful for an email: [e-mail]