[thelist] In need of PHP resources

Andrew Forsberg andrew at thepander.co.nz
Mon Mar 4 13:57:01 CST 2002


>I have been in the process of changing companies and now that I am settling
>in I have found that PHP is in use on some of the projects here. What are
>some of the best PHP resources and does anyone have good recommendations on
>books so that I can, somewhat rapidly, come up to speed?

Hi Jay

For someone who's familiar with plenty of other languages I'd
recommend the New Riders' 'Web Application Development with PHP 4.0'
(Tobias Ratschiller, Till Gerken, ISBN 0-7357-0997-1). It starts with
best practices, which you can gloss over as you like, then looks over
advanced syntax, OOP, web dev strategies with PHP, etc etc. It won't
show you the basics of the language, but after reading the first few
chapters of the online manual you won't need a book for that. IMO
basic PHP syntax (control structures, loops, calling functions,
returning variables, etc etc) is much like Java's (excluding PHP's
idea of OOP, strong-typing, etc). If you're comfortable working
through an online manual then you probably won't need to buy any
books at all.

To 'rapidly come up to speed' why not port something you've done in
another language to PHP? The docs at php.net are excellent, the main
page for each package usually has a tutorial, as do many of the more
specific function pages. Zend has several best practices and advanced
syntax / technique articles too. The top 21 mistakes is a classic:

http://www.zend.com/zend/art/mistake.php
http://www.zend.com/zend/art/mistake2.php
http://www.zend.com/zend/art/mistake3.php

Cheers
Andrew
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