Hi.
I would like to know some good resources (book or website) on learning PHP for those who are already familiar with programming. Many of the tutorials I've been finding are for people who never programmed before and take way to long to go through to even learn basic language constructs. The optimal resource would not assume previous web-development background however.
Thanks, Michal Gorecki
The PHP Manual is what I used, especially with the search box in Firefox. Type in a function name and go. If you haven't already, it's probably worth browsing through while you wait for more answers.
Use http://www.w3schools.com. They've got a great tutorial for beginning and intermediate php programmers. Also, the PHP Manual is fantastic.
This site has some good stuff:
Whenever I am teaching anybody stuff I tell them to just Google "php [insert what you want to do]" and it will usually be in the first few results.
Another option:
It's a bit old now, but I had a great learning experience with The PHP Anthology. If you check it out, please remember that it was published about 5 years ago.
A quick 'net search reveals there's a new one on the market as well, but I don't have experience with it.
I strongly agree with @stalepretzel -- the w3schools and php.net sites are both incredibly rich resources for both getting you started and keeping you going.
For video tutorials (screencasts), you really can't beat "In the Woods - Diving into PHP" -- The first video is here: http://blog.themeforest.net/screencasts/diving-into-php-video-series/
Handy dandy quick ref here: http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/php-cheat-sheet/
When/if you get stuck on a specific problem you can always come back here to SO.
Learning raw PHP is probably the wrong way to go if you're already an experienced programmer. I'd recommend picking up one of the frameworks, such as PHP Cake, Code Ignitor or Symfony. These frameworks attempt to enforce the set of best-practices that have developed for PHP developers over the past six or seven years.
To that end, Symfony has a great, "24 hours" style tutorial that can get you up and running with their framework, which will sneakily expose you to writing PHP code. Even if you decide you don't like symfony, concepts such as MVC, routing, templating, ORM, etc. will be covered. The other frameworks have similar tutorials, but I like the 24, one hour lessons approach.
For questions on specific PHP core functions/classes, php.net serves as a good resource (although the document of some of the core helper classes like XMLReader and the Reflection hierarchy can be sparse).
Try here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/90924/what-is-the-best-php-programming-book
Like you, I have programming experience and even have done some PHP, but not enough to develop websites from scratch. I have ordered this book a couple of days ago and can't wait until it arrives. Hopefully it does all that others say it does :)
I definitely use the official site at php.net and O'Reilly's PHP Cookbook most often.
As well, the zend development zone, http://devzone.zend.com/public/view and Manning's PHP in Action book are useful resources.