That’s a fun topic in and of itself - How’d you get started with this wonky language? I was introduced by needing to modify PHPNuke and vbulletin 2 for a fan site.
Was on w3schools forum browsing through the threads and saw a PHP thread and a guy linked to this website.
Seemed so easy to learn from this website that I started working through the different pages. It was so cool seeing some PHP code hidden from view-soure.
Was in my highschool days. I had webpage designs and I kept asking my teacher a bunch of questions. Years later, I found out what I was asking was actually about PHP. Did some research and got into it. What I had asked my teacher was how would you make a web counter. He only knew HTML and CSS so he didn’t know what I was talking about and told me that it would have to do something with sending the counter to your email so that the numbers are tracked. Found out it had nothing to do with your email rather it was about saving it into a log file using PHP.
Sorry, meant to quote the OP.
Many years back I had “BIG PLANS” for a site but didn’t know anything but html. Hired a guy who worked on it for many months and I ended up paying over $1800 for a site that didn’t even work that well. Decided it was time to learn.
I inherited a web app written in PHP.
The app broke for some unknown reason and after a couple of cursory attempts to fix it, I learnt Rails and rewrote it instead.
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Me too. XD I took over an abandoned PHP application written in spaghetti code but had somewhat of a userbase. I initially tried to maintain it and extend it simply by adding functionality, while eventually it came to a point that a full rewrite is necessary. It’s been taking me almost 2 years for the rewrite, but I am enjoying the process and learning a lot of PHP and OOP than ever.
Wanted ads.
What does that mean?
Care to elaborate?
I got introduced to it by the suggestion that it would teach me about programing, while arming with me with all the tools for basic web development. I was told to learn it would give a good intro into programing. I liked the idea that in order to use it I would have no choice but learn HTML, CSS, and even JavaScript (was optional but a good a one).
I’d learned from them that PHP developers are wanted, and went to W3Schools to start learning it.
I found out that a browser-based MMORPG that I was playing was writtien in PHP so I decided that I’d try and write my own
Same! I played Core Exiles for a long time before trying to delve into the language myself 
I can’t really remember how I got introduced to PHP. I do remember it was when PHP3 was in use and before PHP4 and the Zend Engine.
PHP was a simple step as it was very C like. I used it on our company webpage (http://www.applitec.com). At that time we wanted to have a database of customers and PHP and MySql filled the bill.
Since then I have done a lot of PHP and MySql coding. With the introduction of classes and then namespaces PHP has become a powerful language.
I am retired now but still do some web sites for Rotary and other organizations and PHP is till my favorite back end language.
I was first taught it in a module in uni. I think it was the same module as web server and database management, where we used PHP to connect to a database to get some data. I remember it was a simple script we were using (the mysqli method).
We really got into PHP a couple of years later then when after we were taught object JavaScript so that we can do AJAX . That’s when we got into the deep stuff like classes and frameworks. It fit in though because we were also learning about design patterns with the JavaScript.
Used Clipper, but didn’t know how to apply database design to websites. Host suggested learning PHP and mysql would be a small learning curve - never looked back.
I was originally programming sites in ASP/vbscript. The company that was hosting our sites went out of business with no warning. With the help of Google and all the programming courses I had taken I was able to fairly easily assimilate to PHP/MySQL and get all of our sites back up and running on an old Solaris Unix account with another provider a predecessor had set up. I’ve been a PHP disciple ever since.
I had just started learning programming and was doing python and batch scripts.
Then a colleague phished my facebook password using a simple PHP script. That got me interested and the ease and the fact that it was web based got me hooked. I didn’t look back.
Kevin Yank’s book. I think I wanted to make a web forum.
When I was 12-13 I made a website for a gaming clan I was working playing with. This was back in the .php3 file days. I remember PHP4 being released and couldn’t understand the difference at the time.
I had been using perl but really struggled with it, PHP was a definite step forward although all the tutorials at the time were for PHP3 but I made some quite nice stuff, a poll, a members list, a “member of the month” with voting, a game scheduling thing and a news script. It’s one of the ways I learnt to program 
I started building a Dragon Ball Z website full off animated gifs. But got irritated by my contact form. It opened Outlook Express and I just wanted to send the message. Somewhere on the internet I ran into a form that did not Outlook so I asked how he did it. The kind guy send met a few links to dutch PHP tutorial sites that do not exist anymore. This was around 2000. PHP4 I guess.
Seven years ago that hobby became my job.
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