Throughout the rest of 2010 I’m going to be putting together a tutorial for PHP beginners. We’ll start with an introduction to the language and gradually progress through to more sophisticated tutorials.
If you’re totally new to PHP, you’re exactly who I’m writing this for. When I was trying to learn PHP it took quite a while. I realised that most of the tutorials already out there try to teach you huge amounts of stuff all in one go. This probably isn’t the best way to go about it. I ditched the tutorials quickly and decided to teach myself- deciding on something I wanted to produce, and then working out how to do it. Not only did this mean that I didn’t have to put up with pages of boring “lessons” to learn PHP, it was also quite fun.
And this is the route I’ve decided to take with this- it isn’t a step-by-step walk-through, instead it’s more of a point of reference. Read through it all, just to get a “feel” for what PHP can do, and then for each section set yourself a simple goal and work out how to do it. Actually trying something out and doing it yourself is much for effective than trying to learn the whole lot in one go just by reading. Even if you get stuck on a problem, the longer it takes you to solve the better- it means you probably won’t forget it again.