Thread

I was reading an interview about Rick Ellis and how the whole pMachine (EE) started (I think I stumbled across it from the current EE history thread).

It was inspiring to see that Rick had started to develop Pmachine while he was pursuing a career in sound engineering. This got me thinking about a want to learn PHP/MYSQL so that I’m in a position to program extensions and be comfortable in offering entirely custom coding/addons in my EE work.

While I have always considered myself a web designer, specialising in front end and usability design and css/xhtml template coding I have always tried to steer clear from the programming side of things.

On discovering EE, it gave me the power and flexibility to begin to offer in many cases truly custom solutions while still not touching to much code or programming anything from scratch.

I have decided that it’s time to get more involved with the programming side and I’d love to start developing custom extensions for EE and offer them to the community.

I was just wondering what methods people have found useful for learning PHP & MYSQL? Obviously nothing beats installing MAMP and trailing things and I know php.net has some great manuals, but I was wondering if anyone has some ‘must buy’ books or even some webcasts that they have previously used to learn the language?

I don’t have any particular recommendation but perhaps something that might be of interest to you in this context: Oreilly’s Safari Books Online. For 23 USD/month you get to have 10 books on your virtual bookshelf which means you can add and read up to 10 books from their library. Once you get to 10 books you either have to upgrade or simply swap some books for others. I found this resource invaluable in reading up about ... anything really.

The problem with Safari bookshelf is that for $23 (I think there are cheaper plans though) you aren’t going to read 10 books in one month.  You are just as well off buying just one E-book that you can keep for the same money and actually reading the whole book in that month.

Check out the beginning PHP books at Apress and Manning.  Apress also has a free download of A Programmer’s Introduction to PHP 4.0.  I would stick with PHP 5 though.  There is a big enough difference with things like object oriented programming that you could get needlessly confused.

I would also suggest venturing over to the CodeIgniter side of things.  The documentation is great and the framework gets out of your way.  So coding in CI feels much easier than building add-ons for EE.  You almost don’t even need to know PHP to get started and the community is great for helping new people. 

I don’t know your background but why not stick to things that are closer to your core area of expertise?  I bet there are a ton of things you could learn in usability and interface design. 

I have been doing so much back-end stuff that I get a little more clueless about the CSS and design side every day.  I feel like if I don’t learn something that complements the skills I already have then more important things erode or don’t get learned in the first place.

I really like Safari Bookshelf. While its true that most people aren’t going to read 10 books a month, I find that I read 1 + have 9 others I can use for reference and additional guidance. This makes it very easy to get multiple viewpoints on tricky subjects as you’re going through them. That being said, there is no replacement for a good ol’ paperback by the keyboard either.

If you’re a front-end coder with little or no php knowledge I’d recommend PHP Solutions as a good introductory volume. Follow this up by any of the O’Reilly php books.
Also check out the O’Reilly Courses.
Apart from that, bookmark the php reference manual at php.net and just write code and try things out 😊