Best way to learn PHP for a beginner?

Whats the best and easiest way to learn PHP as a begginer?

Hi there 020916,

I would suggest that you carefully study and practise,
study and practise, study and practise and then study
and practise some more. :ok_hand:

This method is invariably reliable. :sunglasses:

coothead

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Best way to learn PHP for a beginner is Disregard the Naysayers.

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start with codecademy php course.

then try udemy if you can afford.

else try youtube.

keep on reading articles, tutorials and practising.

W3schools is a best source to learn PHP for a beginner and implement the learnt topics for self practice.

Pick something really simple (like a cryptocurrency exchange) and just start coding.

Yes, I’d agree with @ahundiak - think of something you want to write, then write it. I find I learn better when I have a specific requirement to code, rather than just looking at various statements and functions and seeing what they all do. Proper answer depends on what background you have coding in other languages, of course - if none, then some kind of course might be useful.

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Agreed

First, having a localhost server set up is invaluable.
Be it a package like XAMPP or a Virtual Machine, once you have that you won’t need to pay for and FTP to a live host to test.

I’ve never followed it, but there’s A simple tutorial from php.net itself.

I think it’s a good idea to scan the documentation to get an idea of what tools are available,

Make sure you have error reporting and display errors enabled and go for it!

Remember, the documentation is your friend. If that fails you, come here!

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If you already know other programming languages then looking up the PHP equivalent on php.net should be sufficient for most things.

One site to avoid is w3schools.com as that site is way out of date and getting further and further out of date all the time as it covers so many different topics that the two guys who own it would need to work 20 days a week to keep it as far out of date as it already is.

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@020916

Whats the best and easiest way to learn PHP as a begginer?

One of the first projects I developed was a dynamic menu system to visually keep track of previously written scripts. I have gradually refined the basic menu and now able to instantly switch between mirrored localhost site images.

A dynamic menu is also handy when learning to gradually develop difficult concepts. Old versions can be displayed and used as a reference to help with the final solution.

True, they seem to be still teaching PHP version 5

and much of the data appears to have been scraped from the php net docs wiihout any vetting or editing.

@Mittineague

True, they seem to be still teaching PHP version 5

In their defense the W3Schools site is especially useful for quickly grasping new concepts. The Try this feature can be edited, tested and repeatedly tried. If suitable the script can be copied and pasted locally and further developed.

The concept of the site was really good but for just the two individuals who created the site the number of topics they tried to cover is way too much for them to be able to keep up to date. If they had employed additional staff so as to have one person responsible for keeping each topic up to date (or even one person per two topics) then they might have been able to keep the site up to date. I guess they underestimated the popularity their site would get due to the confusion caused by their site name appearing to have some sort of official standing rather than just being a site created by two individuals with no official standing with respect to any of the topics covered whatsoever.

Hmm, I can’t find it now, but yesterday I used the “try this” site. It wasn’t “w3schools” but it looked to be a “sister site” of sorts.

phpinfo() gave a “disabled for security”
but phpversion() showed PHP 7

I have to wonder about the “certificates” they offer. AFAIK there is of yet no accreditation board for coding like there is for other various professions.

As worthless as anything offered by any other place that isn’t an officially recognised training organisation.

I’d just like to add that PHP also provides a built in web server itself – just run (e.g.)

php -S localhost:8888

in your working directory. This creates a simple (but fast!) dev environment for things like form validation or mocking server responses. If you want a database as well, you’d still have to set it up manually, though.

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Now there is a thought. Someone should write a built in database for testing.

php -database name user password

To be a PHP Programmer, you need to learn PHP. You can learn PHP from the following websites:
Udemy online courses

Tutorialpoint.com
W3school

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