How I learned PHP from scratch within a week

Hi to all!

Learning PHP has been a dream for me during my college days. We had no subjects about PHP, just HTML. This was really frustrating because I know how to design websites but adding functionality to it always was a problem. This all changed when I started working and learned PHP online, and the thing is "I LEARNED IT IN ONE WEEK!".

How I did it

First of all, you have to be familiar to programming as well as HTML. PHP or PHP Hypertext Pre-processor is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. But since you want to learn PHP, I would expect that you also have a background about programming and HTML as well.

As for me, I am a BS Information Technology graduate I have been familiar to programming languages like Java, C, Visual Basic , etc. so there was no problem for me learning PHP. I started by visiting www.w3schools.com . The site features tutorials for web development, so if you are not familiar to HTML yet, this may also be a good starting point.

From there you can learn from the basics, starting from an introduction on what PHP is up to advanced tutorials for PHP. Unlike other sites which gives you a specific tutorial for a specific PHP problem, www.w3schools.com gives you a step by step approach on learning PHP. From the re I learned about PHPs syntax, then basic programming. There are no problems in learning to program basic PHP, the codes are much similar to C and the logic of programming with regards to looping and conditions apply to every programming language.

After practicing and getting really familiar to the codes I went a little further with database connections which is still available in the site. With this though you would need a mysql server since the tutorial on the site uses mysql even though there is an ODBC tutorial that comes with it too.

For me, since it was my first time I used WAMP server to save me from the hassles of installing and configuring some components. WAMP is a package for Apache, Mysql, and PHP for windows. You can download it at http://www.wampserver.com/en/download.php.

After that, all you need is to save your files on the root folder and run your PHP.

Hope this helped some of you!