maxxd Posted January 25, 2016 Share Posted January 25, 2016 Hey y'all. I've got a friend that wants to learn PHP and I plan to help him out on it. Unfortunately, I don't have much free time right now and he wants to get started before I've got the chance to sit down with him. Most of the bound books that I have are utterly out-of-date by now, and the more recent are e-books, so I can't loan them out. Has anyone used codecademy before - is it at least decent? It looks like the topics are good, but again I don't really have enough time to audit the classes. I'm pretty much just wanting to make sure that it's not going to start him off down the wrong road; mostly that it's using up-to-date PHP functions and native PHP objects where applicable. Even though he's not planning on doing OO-style PHP from the outset, I think it'd be a boon to learn to use (for instance) the DateTime objects instead of taking the time to learn date(), then to have to relearn everything in DateTime(). Well, that and I do OOP, so I figure it may be a bit easier to use some of my code as examples if he's used to seeing code written in that style. I've run a couple searches through this board and not yet found any concrete opinions (a couple "it's well regarded", or "I hear it's good", but no-one as far as I've found has actually used the site), so if I've missed anything please feel free to point me toward the thread and I can read from there. I very much welcome and thank you for any opinions or thoughts on starting points! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jacques1 Posted January 25, 2016 Share Posted January 25, 2016 CodeAcademy is OK in the sense that it doesn't teach any wrong or bad techniques. However, it doesn't really teach anything at all. There's no PHP/SQL interaction, no templating, no sessions The PHP course is little more than an advanced “Hello world”, and I find the programming-by-numbers approach overly slow, superficial and limiting. I also ran into quite a lot of technical issues where the checker wouldn't recognize the solution until I changed the formatting, or the page got stuck completely. I your friend has never written a single line of code in any language, he may very well enjoy the introduction. But if he prefers a faster, more abstract, more thorough way of learning, CodeAcademy is probably not the best choice. It's indeed a crying shame that there doesn't seem to be a single good PHP book (something like “21st century PHP”). However, there are good resources for special topics like the Hashphp PDO tutorial or the marvellous PHP Security Book by Pádraic Brady. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maxxd Posted January 25, 2016 Author Share Posted January 25, 2016 Well, glad to know it at least doesn't disseminate questionable or outdated information and techniques. Shame there's no real content to the course, though. Good to know all the way around. He's not written any code - done some HTML and LESS, but that's it - and seems to enjoy when he's got a concrete footing to begin with, so the intro may be a good spot to start. I'll point him towards the PDO tutorial, and I'm ordering the security book for myself! Thanks much! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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