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curious monkey Posts: 620 Joined: 4/28/2006 From: The lower handle of US Status: offline	Books - 9/1/2009 19:40:53 So OF family... I have decided on embarking on teaching myself PHP from books and other online means. In your opinion what is/are the best books out there to have some self study for someone that knows next to nothing? I'm also going to learn Coldfusion... eek. It seems that going forward those 2 languages are going to be the future so I guess I should learn them. _____________________________ I have a ringing in my head and no one to help me answer it


womble Posts: 6009 Joined: 3/14/2005 From: Living on the edge Status: offline	RE: Books - 9/4/2009 6:53:00 One of the best online resources I've found for PHP is tizag.com, which has some good tutorials on the basics of PHP. Books wise, my favourite is "PHP fast and easy web development" by Julie Meloni, which was the book I used when I did a distance learning course with the Open University on PHP ("Open source web development"). There's also one called "Sams Teach yourself PHP in 24 hours" by Matt Zandstra, which was another one I used a lot during the course. For PHP and MySQL, my favourites are from the "for dummies" series: "PHP and MySQL Web Development All-in-one Desk Reference for Dummies" and "PHP and MySQL Everyday Applications for Dummies" (both by Janet Valade). Another excellent (though expensive one) for PHP/MySQL is "PHP and MySQL Web Development (Developer's Library)" (Luke Welling, 4th edition). I found it around £30 in bookshops, but Amazon had it for around £20. The "everyday applications" one is nice because it actually works through creating 7 useable applications using PHP and MySQL with the complete code for them, but also talks you through each step explaining why it's written as it is. I also did a course on Coldfusion a couple of years ago (well, it was database development actually, but they taught Coldfusion along with it as it was the easiest to teach/learn to be able to do stuff with the databases we were creating - again, a 12 week course I did with the OU), and it's a very nice language - logical and easy to learn, and there are a lot of pre-built functions in it for connecting to databases and working with forms etc. Again, "Sams" has a "teach yourself in 24 hours" book on Coldfusion Express, which is a cut-down version of Coldfusion which uses some of the most common aspects of Coldfusion. I think it's out of print now, but it's still available usually on Amazon. _____________________________ ~~ "A cruel god ain't no god at all" ~~ ~~ Erase hate. Practice love. ~~ (in reply to curious monkey)


Tailslide Posts: 6692 Joined: 5/10/2005 From: Out here on the raggedy edge Status: offline	RE: Books - 9/4/2009 7:42:40 I had a lot of difficulty with PHP books. I tried (really I did) to read several of these books which came to me highly recommended - but each time I'd find myself falling asleep!! Consequently my PHP knowledge tends to be trial and error - I can do what I can do and that's about it! The other issue is that you have to ensure any books you do buy ar PHP 5 - then there's the issue of whether you go for Pear or not (I don't) and Object Orientated Programming or more old-school procedural. I have found several websites really useful - tizag.com as recommended by Womble is really good - clear, useful examples. Also - forums (fora?) are a great help... sometimes. There are a few that are really tough and virtually any question is answered by a link to the PHP manual site (yeah thanks!) which is like eating crackers with no drink. I hesitate to recommend another forum on here - but Sitepoint has a wonderful, friendly and very active PHP forum - I'd recommend joining there just for that. They don't jump down your throat if you ask something "stupid". Sitepoint also do lots of tutorials and books which are usually fairly high quality. PHP is one of those things that there are ways of doing it; there are ways of doing it right; there are ways of doing it well and there are ways of doing it really really slick. I'd suggest using tizag.com as a basis and then going to sitepoint php forum and ask them if there's a better way of doing something and why - they're usually happy to explain. _____________________________ Little Blue Plane Web Design \| Land Rover project (in reply to womble)


womble Posts: 6009 Joined: 3/14/2005 From: Living on the edge Status: offline	RE: Books - 9/4/2009 8:39:31 quote: ORIGINAL: Tailslide The other issue is that you have to ensure any books you do buy ar PHP 5 - then there's the issue of whether you go for Pear or not (I don't) and Object Orientated Programming or more old-school procedural. That's why I like the "for dummies" "everyday applications" one, because it covers PHP 5 (but also explains how you might have to change it if you're using PHP 4) and also explains both the procedural and OOP method of doing the same thing. Fora tend to be very hit and miss. To be honest I've not had much success with fora always - often I've found that if I have some specific code that isn't working properly help's usually fairly forthcoming, but if I'm trying to do something and I've no idea how to accomplish whatever it is, often it can be a very long and protracted process to figure out how to do it and the precise method needed. _____________________________ ~~ "A cruel god ain't no god at all" ~~ ~~ Erase hate. Practice love. ~~ (in reply to Tailslide)


curious monkey Posts: 620 Joined: 4/28/2006 From: The lower handle of US Status: offline	RE: Books - 9/4/2009 22:50:45 Thank you ladies I appreciate it. I will look into all of the options. I like the "... for dummies" series but I normally learn from trial and error. _____________________________ I have a ringing in my head and no one to help me answer it (in reply to womble)


womble Posts: 6009 Joined: 3/14/2005 From: Living on the edge Status: offline	RE: Books - 9/5/2009 4:51:35 quote: ORIGINAL: curious monkey Thank you ladies I appreciate it. I will look into all of the options. I like the "... for dummies" series but I normally learn from trial and error. Looking at the code for forum software was the way I learnt the first bits of PHP I learned. Messing around with PHPBB and then later SMF (a much nicer forum system IMHO) was how I first familiarised myself with the uses of PHP and how it did what it did. The code's usually pretty well commented as well, and you can get an idea of what a block of code's for from the file it's in's filename. They're usually divided pretty logically into the different main functions of the tasks the software needs to do and the views users will want to see, so it makes it easier to figure out what a particular piece of code's for. If I found some code that wasn't very well commented or I couldn't figure out what it did I'd have a rummage online and check out the PHP tutorials. It's often better to learn from trial and error though, as you say, especially if you've got a small task that can be accomplished by a bit of PHP to practice on. At the moment I'm trying to figure out how I can write data to a file to make updating a site a bit more user-friendly. I'm using a script (someone else's) in a few places on the site and there are some variables in the script that can be altered, depending on what result I want. Of course the easiest way from my point of view is to simply open up the script file and change the variables' values, but I'm trying to set it up so I can update the values from a form, so that I can just type the values into the form and then when I submit the form it'll update the script's file. Strictly speaking it's not something I have to do, but I'm learning a lot by figuring out how to do it through a combination of using bits of code from the books and others from online tutorials etc. _____________________________ ~~ "A cruel god ain't no god at all" ~~ ~~ Erase hate. Practice love. ~~ (in reply to curious monkey)


Tailslide Posts: 6692 Joined: 5/10/2005 From: Out here on the raggedy edge Status: offline	RE: Books - 9/5/2009 6:54:36 Trial and error is definitely the best way unless you're actually able to read a PHP book cover to cover!!! I think I started off with a list of "usefull things" and worked my way through them. Once you get it sorted you've got a chunk of code that you can reuse and reuse. I think I did: 1. PHP Includes 2. Conditional stuff (e.g. if this page is home then do this) 3. PHP rotating text script 4. Opening a flat file and writing to it then closing it again 5. Writing text to a MySQL db via an online form 6. As above but using TinyMCE to allow formatting in textareas 7. 4+5+ uploading photos to the server and associating with an entry in db Apart from WordPress, the above is the majority of what I do in PHP. _____________________________ Little Blue Plane Web Design \| Land Rover project (in reply to womble)


womble Posts: 6009 Joined: 3/14/2005 From: Living on the edge Status: offline	RE: Books - 9/5/2009 8:48:00 Yay, and I've finally figured out how to write information from a form into a file that includes variables, which updates the variables which then go into a script that displays some nice graphics (depending on the value of the different variables). As Tailslide says, you quickly find yourself with chunks of code that you can reuse again, or you have a script that's very similar to something new you're trying to accomplish, and with a few tweaks, or using the same principles, you can do whatever the new task is. I've been working on this particular problem for a couple of days now, and finally the penny dropped where I was going wrong a while ago. It's taken me a while to get there (through a combination of looking at stuff online such as tizag, bits of my PHP books, and old forum threads about problems similar to the one I've been working on), but having done it once now it'll help greatly in a few months time when I've got to add some features to an existing site where my client wants to be able to add information into the site himself. I know that part of what I'm going to have to do for this client is set up something where he can simply enter information on a form to update it (though at some point it's also going to have to include holding information in a database and probably uploading photos as well). Now I've solved part of the puzzle on a different project I know the PHP in-built functions I'll need to use and roughly how I'll need to set it up, so it's one less thing to have to figure out when I come to do it...and of course if I get really stuck with the rest of it I'll ask Tail! _____________________________ ~~ "A cruel god ain't no god at all" ~~ ~~ Erase hate. Practice love. ~~ (in reply to Tailslide)