What should I do to become a good PHP developer?

What should I do to become a good PHP developer?
Currently I am learning PHP on Treehouse and reading kickstart PHP from Sitepoint, what you advice me to do? What books should I read?
And finally what time do i need to become junior PHP developer? (if I work hard)

Do you NEED to become a “Junior PHP Developer”? No. For the record, i’ve never actually held a job as a “PHP Developer”. (I have done odd jobs as a Web developer, but never been employed exclusively for PHP).

What should you do to become a good PHP developer? Develop PHP.

Books are great - we’ve got a couple of really good ones on this site [go go self promotion] - but the single best way to improve your skills is to USE them. Create a script. Make it do things. Expand it. Streamline it. Make another script. Do it all again.

If you need a challenge, go through this forum, read the first post of a thread, and try and solve it yourself. When you’ve come up with a solution, read the rest of the thread, and find out what other people said, what code they suggested.

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practise, follow recent blogs/discussions, practise, and of course practise.

  1. the PHP Manual

  2. books/articles about how the web works

  3. books/articles about (general) application design

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Think of something you want to write, then write it. To me, there’s nothing like the exercise of trying to solve a problem of your own to help you learn. Reading books is fine, doing their exercises is fine, but part of the skill in any kind of development is understanding the question and how to find the answer. So think of a web site you’d like to have (please, note a jokes database :slight_smile: ) and write it.

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I’m sure OP is just meaning, when should they consider themselves hire-able at that level, which is a perfectly valid question. And one whose answer is unfortunately murky. If you want a job that lists itself as a junior or entry level PHP developer, you simply need enough of a grasp on the language to be comfortable in it. Beyond that… it’s hard to say until you try. As the others here have said, practice, build sites. Read books. Build more sites. You’ll learn best by doing. If you have questions, look them up and research them first, then when you can’t figure something out, ask people you know, or come here and ask.

Learning basics from books and tutorials is good, but doing things will get you much farther.

Also, learning MVC from the start could be pretty daggone useful, and using PDO for your database connections. That way you don’t have to unlearn habits later.

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Thank you all :slight_smile: Currently I’m doing little project and when I will finish it I will write down the link and you can judge me :smiley:

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Amen! :smile:

Scott

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