What's the best way for a fairly experience developer to learn PhP

Question

I got decent experience in .Net, and some experience in Python, and zero experience in PhP. Now I want to learn some PhP, is there any web resources that are geared towards person like me?

And what are the tools that PhP programmers normally use?

Duplicate:

PHP tutorial or/and tool has been already discussed at SO many time.

1. /what-is-your-preferred-tool-stack-for-php-development-in-the-windows-environment
2. /great-eclipse-set-up-for-php-development
3. /the-best-php-editor-for-vista
4. /what-are-some-pros-and-cons-of-the-various-php-ides
5. /any-good-php-ide-preferably-free-or-cheap

Answer 1

I learned a lot from http://php.net. Also there are very much starter tutorials on the internet.

Just start trying to make some example sites. It's not hard for someone who allready has programming experience to step over to PHP so you should pick it up quite easily.

About tools: I use eclipse myself as an IDE. I'm about to try it with the aptana plugin, because it has debugging suport.

But there are several other IDE's you could try like Zend Studio. vs.php and a lot more.

A local webserver is easy too, like XAMPP or EasyPHP.

Answer 2

Whenever you want to learn a new language, then best thing is to download snippets of code that do exactly what you are after and change the code.

If you are just learning PHP. Do not bother with the web frameworks like EasyPHP/XAMPP as Ikke mentioned above. They are more complicated and you will then have both the language to learn and a heavy featured IDE.

Download snippets from PHP code websites (google is your friend) and customise them.

If you wanted to go the route of using software to customise (which as I said is harder), you could try to customise a Wordpress theme by editing the PHP files in the wordpress theme directory:

wordpress/wp-content/themes/nameofthetheme/

Try editing a file such as: "sidebar.php". You can try editing a small part of wordpress and see the changes for yourself.

The only reason I mention Wordpress for learning PHP is because initially, that's exactly how I learned PHP. I had tried reading books and the only thing that helped me to understand PHP was to change it for something that I actually wanted to work on.

Answer 3

I use vim as my text editor. Unless you are using something like Xdebug on the server, an IDE is rather overkill for PHP. And before the naysayers downvote my blasphemus statement, you can get intellisense with vim as well.

Sorry, what i meant to say was, all you really need is the php binary and a simple text editor to write .php files

Answer 4

Learn:

The best : php.net but you can have great tutorial at tizag. If you need more tutorial here is something that can help you start with,

Tools:

IDE - (light one) UE Studio (www.ultraedit.com):

1. I like to type my code manually
2. There's basic intellisense to help me pass all the right function arguments
3. It can collapse big functions to get them out of the way
4. It has decent code highlighting that I can customize
5. It's not "option overload" like eclipse
6. It has built-in project management features
7. It's fast enough to be a notepad replacement
8. There's this really cool feature I like where typing '..' turns into '->' for object programming in C/PHP

Of course, you can use a complete IDE: I like too Eclipse with PDT. I have to say that this is a better option because it's very complete with debugger, syntax highlight, etc.

Source control: SVN (http://subversion.tigris.org/)

1. Great price (free)
2. Integrates with UltraEdit
3. TortoiseSVN integrates really well with Windows.
4. SVN is considered by many to be a 'standard' - so it's good to get good at using it

Debugging: Firefox + Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug

1. Firefox renders web pages quickly
2. Firefox is one of the most standards-compliant browsers
3. FF works on many platforms (Mac/Win/Linux)
4. "Code your page for FF, then make it work for IE"
5. Web developer lets you see your page in many different ways (with/out css, images, etc)
6. I'm not sure if it gets much better than firebug for debugging javascript!