Need a book for my PHP class...

H

Hyper_Psycho

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For some crazy reason the PHP class was removed from the curriculum at my school. Therefore, I am taking a directive studies in order to learn it.

Doing so, I have to get myself all of the learning materials.

The basic premise of the class is to keep a blog and teach myself to do things in PHP. What would be the easiest way of doing this?

Most importantly what book should I buy that would teach me the essentials and lead me slowly into creating some sort of PHP functionality on a website.

Any suggestions are welcomed.

:D
 
Well I might not be a whole lot of help, since I've never read a PHP book, but the first thing I'd do is ask the teacher what materials they did use for the class, assuming you're able to.

I don't know what the situation is, and why it was dropped, and if the the teacher who taught it was let go, but can't you ask about books and other materials used? If the school had textbooks for this class, but no longer do, you can get the name and find them cheap/used online.

In the past I've used www.devshed.com for some references to PHP.
 
thanks on the link

i would like to have a book so that both my teacher and I can read it

i am taking the class with a teacher i had in the past several times and I know he is not going to stress me out over the work

the teacher who thought the php class is no longer employed by my univeristy as i understand ... otherwise i would have made him pick the course back up !
 
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Not so much hardware as software. You'll need a testbed with PHP installed. You can do this yourself on a networked computer at your home, but that can be rather complicated. Just about any company you purchase a hosting plan from will have PHP installed, so if you have the money you can do that and erase alot of the technical woes.
 
TranquilRed said:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/03...40376/ref=sr_1_17/102-1039102-7308921?ie=UTF8

The above is a great book. I used it to launch myself into PHP. It teaches the fundamentals and the advanced techniques with a mildly humurous overtone. It also has a function reference in the back index.
Click to expand...

A fantastic book. I used it as well. Larry Ullman also did another book devoted more to php only (instead of with mysql). It goes at a bit slower pace, and gives more examples and details. It can be found here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321245652/ref=pd_bxgy_img_b/103-1020523-9070226?ie=UTF8

I still like the first book better though as I like the mysql stuff too.

Another cool thing about these books is that there is an online support forum that the author participates in. You can ask questions about the examples in the book, or pretty much whatever else pertaining to php. I have used that forum several times too. It is the complete package.
 
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FlipperBizkut said:
A fantastic book. I used it as well. Larry Ullman also did another book devoted more to php only (instead of with mysql). It goes at a bit slower pace, and gives more examples and details. It can be found here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321245652/ref=pd_bxgy_img_b/103-1020523-9070226?ie=UTF8

I still like the first book better though as I like the mysql stuff too.

Another cool thing about these books is that there is an online support forum that the author participates in. You can ask questions about the examples in the book, or pretty much whatever else pertaining to php. I have used that forum several times too. It is the complete package.
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thats awesome
....

thanks on the suggestion

now would i have to have anything special installed on my machine and/or server
 
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Hyper_Psycho said:
in terms of hardware, is there anything special i need in order to mess around with the code and such ?
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Pretty much any computer with an internet connection will work well for your testing purposes. You may even be able to get away without an internet connection if you use the localhost method below.

The free way to do this would be to set up one of your computers with apache and php. I've never done this in windows. In ubuntu it is very easy to do. You could even install it on the same computer that you primarilly use and browse to your testbed using http://localhost.

One alternative may be silenceisdefeat.org where you can sign up for a username to remote into a linux server. You also get a website at http://silenceisdefeat.org/~USERNAME. I'm not sure if php is enabled and I seem to have misplaced the email with my password so I can't check at the moment. The only catch is that you have to make a donation to get an account -- as little as $1 is accepted via paypal.

And if you can afford college textbooks i'm sure you can afford a cheap hosting plan. This would be a good solution if you don't want to be bothered with having to do anything yourself and if silenceisdefeat is a no-go. http://www.ashosted.com is a good host for the money, I use them personally for two of the pages in my signiture (both of which are php based.) You can get a plan for $3.99 a month and if you are doing this class in a semester, then you should only need to keep your account for 4 or 5 months.
 
PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson

This is the book I've been using since Day 1 learning PHP. I have a great site up for my department in my company and add more to it every day. I started out with a knowledge of HTML only and have learned just a hell of a lot from this book. I consider it a must have for the beginning PHP Programmer.


I have also been known to look up some information in
Programming PHP (O'Reilly)

These two books are great buys and have been huge investments for me. My company is about to "redefine my job requirements and salary" because of the programming i've been doing. They're happier about what i've accomplished than I am. :-D

Over the Next week i'm taking my site to completely object oriented programming thanks to these books.

and to improve my implementation I'm going to pickup PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice
 
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If you have ever programmed in any language such as, C++ or Java and are familiar with programming princiapls like loops, if/else statements etc, then php will very easy for you.
The best resource are:
php.net as a reference
google.com for specific problems you may have
 
{NcsO}ReichstaG said:
If you have ever programmed in any language such as, C++ or Java and are familiar with programming princiapls like loops, if/else statements etc, then php will very easy for you.
The best resource are:
php.net as a reference
google.com for specific problems you may have
Click to expand...


hhaha
yeah
i did both C++ in highschool , Java for several years in college

google is my best friend, thats for sure

im trying to spend the least ammount of money on the books for this class ....
 
I took a PHP course in college and the required text was The Web Wizards Guide to PHP. It provides good examples, gives you programming problems to try and gives good questions to cover material at the end of each section. It was pretty cheap too.
 
faceless105 said:
i love "php, mysql and apache". it's by sams teach yourself
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this is the book I used.

I came from a c/c++ background and picked up on a lot of it very fast. If you know VB and/or Java...it should be just as easy
 
thanks a bunch on all of the suggestion guys

hopefully I will be able to do everything with PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites

:cool:
 
Portable Xampp this is a great program for php and mysql development. It's a usb flash drive friendly installation of apache, mysql, and php. Just put it on a flash drive and take your work with you everywhere you go. I typically just copy the folder off of the drive onto the computer I'm working on and then copy it back on when I'm done to minimize writes to the disk. BTW it is on Windows and works on 2k and xp as far as I know.
 
th3rmite said:
Portable Xampp this is a great program for php and mysql development. It's a usb flash drive friendly installation of apache, mysql, and php. Just put it on a flash drive and take your work with you everywhere you go. I typically just copy the folder off of the drive onto the computer I'm working on and then copy it back on when I'm done to minimize writes to the disk. BTW it is on Windows and works on 2k and xp as far as I know.
Click to expand...


cool
ill check it out
 
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