Dan Olsen’s Weblog

In my spare time I have been learning the PHP scripting language. I was amazed to find out that a lot of tutorials you can find on the web lack real substance. I am not saying that you can’t find good tutorials; I’m just saying there are a lot of poorly written ones that could almost make a person sick.

After searching for some good tutorials, I finally decided on a couple that I really liked. The first would have to be the tutorial found at W3Schools Online Web Tutorials. This tutorial takes you through all the basic steps of learning a language such as syntax and how the different statements and functions work. Many of the other tutorials out there just started in the middle and expected you to figure out the syntax. Personally, I prefer to understand the code I am going to be reading before they start throwing it at me.

Of course there is always the documentation to the PHP scripting language. Who would know PHP better then the people who wrote it? The documentation gives you an introduction to the language much like W3Schools does. Something I like about the PHP documentation is that there are comments at the end of most, if not all, pages. Some of these comments have been quite helpful to me in understanding different ways the scripting language can be used. Not only that, the code in the documentation is in color which gives it some spunk.

Although you can usually find great tutorials on the web, I always prefer to have a book or two in my possession on the topic. The hard part about books is finding the one that best suits my needs. There are plenty of PHP books out there and most of them I found to be quite useful. In the end, I found the book that looked like it would give me what I was looking for. The book is called Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache. I have a few of the Teach Yourself books by Sams Publishing, and they are some of my favorite books. This book is simple and straight forward and gives some great examples. I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for a good book on PHP. As the title suggests, it also covers MySQL and Apache since PHP is commonly used with these programs.

Another book I use as a reference and read little bit from now and again is the PHP Bible. The “Bible” books are another set of books I have grown accustomed to. I can usually find what I’m looking for when I have a question on more specific parts of the language.

PHP is growing more and more popular everyday. If you are looking for an Internet scripting language to use to build a website, I would recommend PHP. I have friends that tell me J2EE is better, but I haven’t been exposed to it yet I can’t say whether or not it is, but I do know that PHP is a great language.