ASP.NET developer looking to learn PHP

Question

I am an ASP.NET/C# developer by trade but am looking to take on some PHP/MySQL work on the side. Can anyone recommend some good resources for me? Websites and books would be appreciated.

I looked at this question but didn't find the answers particularly helpful. More specifically, I'm looking for PHP equivalents of what I have been using with ASP.NET

• Master Pages
• Separation of Logic + Markup
• Object and Classes

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The Smarty Template Engine provides something similar to separation of logic and markup. It also allows you to create Master Pages to a certain degree:

http://www.smarty.net/

Furthermore, you could look into using a framework such as CakePHP which provides the MVC model (there are others out there of course).

As far as Object and Classes go, I'll leave that up to the experts :) I just know several people bash PHP for no having full Object-Oriented support in earlier version (PHP 5 is getting closer?).

Answer 2

I'd say pick up any book on topic and start doing some stuff. That's the fastest way to learn anything.
I did it with this book.

Answer 3

Personally I would suggest against anything which runs on PHP4, such as Smarty or CakePHP. PHP4 is old and outdated.

For someone who comes from ASP.NET, I would recommend learning the language basics from the excellent documentation at www.php.net, and after that you can continue and pick up a PHP framework. For example the Zend Framework and Symfony are good choices to learn. They are also both well established and have a high quality codebase, which you can use to learn more.

Personally I'm in favor of Zend Fw, as it's loosely coupled and code using it is easy to unit test with PHPUnit. They also have similar components to what you're asking, such as master page like functionality with Zend Layout, separation of view and logic with MVC (Zend Controller and Zend View) and it's fully object-oriented.

Answer 4

Here's a related question that you might be interested in.

Answer 5

For learning PHP from basics, I think the best resource would be http://w3schools.com. This is where I learned myself, and it's still helpful from time to time.

From here, just googling some normal programming problems and adding 'PHP' to the end of the query usually gets you a nice tutorial. For example, googling 'website security PHP' would land you a PHP tutorial on securing sites.

• Master Pages
• Separation of Logic + Markup
• Object and Classes

As for equivalents to these, learning some very known PHP Frameworks, such as Zend and/or Symfony. I'm with the guy in the first answer, I wouldn't recommend learning PHP4 since it's already outdated.