Fastest Way to Learn PHP

What is the fastest way to learn PHP? I’ve heard it is one of the most popular scripting languages, and free to learn, but I do not have as long as it seems to take.

I suggest the w3schools dot com and their PHP tutorial. It runs on through everything from what PHP is, to the installation of the necessary software, to explanations of data types to advanced things like file handling and MySQL.

I thought MySQL was a separate database tool.

It is, but a lot of PHP websites pull data from MySQL websites, whether for a shopping cart or generating a price quote.

I’m no where near that skill level.

Learn-PHP.org has free interactive tutorials for PHP.

What do I have to download to get that to work?

Nothing, it is all through the website. However, that site is not as complete as W3schools dot com.

I want a complete resource if I can find it.

Go to the source. Start with PHP.net.

If reading all of their specification documentation taught me about the language, I’d have Java down by now, from all the time spent trying to figure it out.

PHP.net has basics like the language reference, the FAQ to answer most basic questions and the guide. PHPacademy dot org has a lot of decent, free beginner PHP tutorials.

What else do you recommend?

LearnXinYMinutes dot com is a good resource.

I want to learn PHP, not X.

I know there are a few one letter programming languages like C, F and R, but that website is supposed to teach you the basics of any programming language, in a number of minutes.

That does get points for being fast.

I’ll give them points for the basics of syntax and program structure, but it is not as thorough at explaining the how and why as some of the other sites.

I’m barely at the point of programming hello world; I’ll worry about advanced structure later.

Try Code Academy. They have a lot of good free online tutorials to get you up to speed once you’re past Hello World, around four hours for the beginner level and a long weekend to get to the advanced stuff.

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