how did you learn..?

[CircularStopSign]

this topic has probably been posted many times, but for some reason i cannot find it.  for instance, What did you read?- What did you code?-etc..

thanks

[onlyican]

To start of with, I read PHP and MySQL for Dummies, V2
Well, I say I started
It was a case of Jumping in the Deep end to build something for someone, I asked a lot of help.
I also find reading posts on the forums help
If you cant help, but think it could be useful, watch out for the answer. Then you know.

Thats why i spend a lot of time helping people out in forums.
They helped me out big time when i started, now I am here to help

[Daniel0]

[s]Other people's scripts and tutorials. I've never read a single book on programming or PHP.[/s]

Edit: I missed something:
I have read other people's scripts and tutorials. I've never read a single book on programming or PHP.

[zq29]

I think I also have a copy of PHP and MySQL for Dummies lying around somewhere - That was the first and only book I bought on the subject, although, looking back on it, I'm not really a fan of the coding style and methods in the book. I have since developed my own coding style. Other than that book, I think I read through a few of the PHP Freaks tutorials and asked questions on these here forums. Once you have learnt the basics, the PHP Manual is an excellent source of help and information.

[onlyican]

I said I got PHP and MySQL for dummies, I only read it the other month (I was in hospital for a while)
It was a bit crap
Too much babling, not enough teaching
and it is all basics
try
www.w3schools.com

[Jocka]

It honestly all started with me wanting to see how easy it was to hack some phpBB forums I had. Of course, starting out, phpBB code was a completely different language to me.
I downloaded a few small scripts and studied them and rewrote them to be "better". I also looked at tutorials (mainly on here) and get alot of help from here. Now when I need help my first source is the php manual and if I can't find it there, I come back here.

[radalin]

Well yes I starter by studying phpBB too :) It's a great walkthrought on how to make a good and working php system. Also there was lots of modes about phpbb which while copying and pasting it was great to find out what they were doing in their.
Then I bought a book about php but I couldn't get too much things from that. The best and fastest way is to code instead of reading. Well but books are good for references whereever you loose you can look at them.

Of course there is also php manual, which is very very helpful but sometimes you can get lost in it. If you don't know what you are looking for exactly. And maybe the most useful thing in learning a language is the auto complete function of your IDE. with a little bit of guessing (string function should begin str,...) you can find whatever you want. This auto complete function is so great in some IDE's that you don't need to know anything (like Visual Studio or DW or Zend Studio). And by this I think that all you need to know is to know what you should write till you get to dot or "->" in PHP5 :)

[jsimmons]

I jumped into the deep end while the lifeguard was talking to some chick.  I learned mostly via the php.net web page.  Most of my problems/errors are typos, like the one I found yesterday - I have this class that contains an array called "massagedData".  Sometime during one of my furious coding sessions, this inadvertantly got changed to "managedData" in the class functions, and everything stopped working.  I was bench-blind, and it took me an hour to find out what I had done.  It's what you might call a forehead-slapper.

For the record, PHP is a lot harder to do than C++.  At least with C++, the compiler tells you when you do stupid crap like that.

[ober]

My former co-worker said "I wonder if we can do this on the intranet site"... so I prototyped a conversion from Access to MS-SQL with PHP and it bloomed from there.  I've done sites for my own customer's and built up a complete internal website for the company I used to work for.

I didn't have any books and anything I needed to look up came from php.net.

[Barand]

My manager presented me with a "Cobalt Cube Server" loaded with Apache, PHP and MySql and said to me "See what you can do with that". Searching the web I found Kevin Yank's "Data Driven Websites" tutorials which showed me how to access MySql database and I downloaded the .chm version of the manual from php.net. From there it was jump in the deep end and start developing intranet apps, and research when someone asks something on these boards that I haven't come across before.

[.josh]

PHP in Easy Steps.  Then the manual. But mostly everything i know about PHP i learned directly or indirectly from here.

[pixy]

A Book. Called "PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Sites" by Larry Ullman. They recommend against the book, but I learned everything from it.

I always recommend to people who want to learn: buy a book! I love books.

[AndyB]

'Forced' into it when a very, very, very, large site with expansion plans was simply far too unwieldy to work on as plain html.  Worked with a 'team' comprising people across the US and Canada, as well as people in the UK and Australia and eventually got the site converted over to run with php includes and a partial database.  And that was all done for free!!

Then I read, read, read.  Messed with simple scripts. Made lots of dumb mistakes. Read some more. Made progressively more esoteric mistakes in coding.  Read a lot - especially here as there's always something useful and new to learn.