Picking up PHP
After much procrastinating, I took my first steps into learning PHP over the weekends. I’ve been previously building web applications on ASP.NET for about bit over a year. One thing that always struck me about picking up another programming language is the difficulty in locating just the right book which starts off and maintains an appropriate difficulty curve. A significant number of books and online tutorials tend to start at the very elementary level and come to a screeching halt before they get very far. I’ve a programming background so I don’t need all that introductory stuff to the addition of variables, why use a function and when to use a loop. If someone could point me to a good resource, that’ll be great.
At the same time, I also want to throw a question out to some of you that have extensive programming backgrounds. How do you go about picking up another language? Do you roughly scan through some tutorials, and then attempt to take a written program apart and understand it through tinkering with it (what I’m doing at the moment)? Or do you follow through a tutorial or book entirely, through the usual hello world and all that?
Neither. I focus on the task I need to do that required the use of this programming language, then I try implementing it in that language, relying on tutorials, example programs, message board posts and anything else I can grab to get me to the point where I can do what I need to do.
I find having a specific goal in mind helps focus the learning — like learning Erlang and J to help speed through a particularly involved calculation that required distributed processing and multiple cores.
If you want to learn PHP, I have to ask if you already know Perl. PHP is based on Perl, and knowing Perl will help you vastly on PHP, and in every day life, assuming you’re comfortable with a *nix terminal shell :)
Usually I program something with that language in order to learn how it works. That seems to be the best way to learn a language on my own time.
On the other hand I have been formally trained in Java, and it’s definitely a big difference when there is a structured education to ensure you learn all the ins and outs of the programming language.
Thanks for the comments.
Nope, I’ve not done Perl before. My previous languages that I dealt with were Java and VB.NET/C#. Java was formally taught as one of the major subjects in my diploma. VB.NET/C# were briefly introduced but I used what was taught as a launchpad to keep exploring and carried on from there on my own.
I guess I could try converting some of my projects that I’ve done in ASP.NET over to PHP and see how that goes.
I would still recommend starting with Perl. It’s more interactive, and by the time you get to PHP, a lot of the syntax will be second nature to you, and you can focus on PHP’s links to databases and code generation.
For learning perl I suggest the “Learning Perl” book by O’Reilly.
In a way php is like perl but in other ways they are very different. My main source of PHP information is http://www.php.net. The comments in the online manual can be very helpful including sample code.
My php experience started with modifying open source applications like WebCalendar and later on I wrote a few scripts on my own.