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Learning PHP – Part 1: Getting Started

An Egyptian Bazaar (from The Commons)

Having finished off my HTML and CSS review and learning, I had a hard time deciding where to go next. Having already learned some JavaScript previously, I poked around in the W3schools tutorials for it, but ended up deciding to tackle PHP and MySQL.

Part of the reason I decided on PHP and MySQL is because I've had a book on the two technologies sitting around for some time. So I've been working my way through PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites (2^nd Edition) by Larry Ullman. So far, in my humble opinion, it's an excellent book. I'm finding it is getting through the material at a good pace. The progression is quite logical from one chapter to the next, and the examples are quite relevant and useful. Since the book has been sitting around for awhile, it covers PHP 5 (which is now at version 5.3.6 a.k.a. PHP 6) and MySQL 4.1 (now at version 5.5). Obviously this makes it a bit out of date, but as far as I understand, the versions that I'm looking at are both still widely used, and the newer versions aren't a whole lot different.

Before jumping into the actual work I've done in learning PHP and MySQL, I figure I should give a bit of an introduction to what exactly PHP and MySQL are and what you do with them. The book also does this, which wasn't exactly that useful for me since I've got a fairly good undstanding of many web technologies, even if I don't know the details of how to actually use them.