January 2001 talk by Sandy Antunes
for the GSFC Webmasters Meeting

 

Typical learning curves for PHP
and resources and tutorials, oh my!

Book lists

Zend.com, PHP.net, and ResourceIndex.com all have lists.

Learn it

  1. DevShed.com has items like Website Database Basics With PHP and MySQL

  2. php.net, under links, has many reference sites in several languages

  3. PHPBuilder.com has nice specific articles as well as code, including advanced material like PDFLib, etc.

How tricky to learn?

If you know Perl: trivial.

If you know C or Fortran, easy.

If you know JavaScript, it's not dissimilar and more forgiving

If you work in Java, C++, or other OOP, you may get frustrated.

If you don't yet program, it has simple syntax, is fairly forgiving, and has useful error messages.

Nuance: Must be compiled into your server!

Reference: DevShed.com's The Soothingly Seamless Setup of Apache, SSL, MySQL, and PHP By Israel Denis Jr., revised by Eugene Otto, June 07, 2000

So why haven't you talked about databases yet?