What resources are you using to learn PHP?

[catgirl]

PHP is one of the most commonly used programming languages on the web. Many developers have a love-hate relationship with the language, despite criticism the security and performance of the language has significantly improved with PHP 7 and will continue with PHP 8. Most recently I've been reading the book Mastering PHP 7 by Branko Ajzele on PacktPub. It discusses the new and advanced features of PHP. What resources are you using to learn PHP?

 

[Nova]

When I first learned PHP, I started with W3Schools. I am not sure if their tutorials are updated as they used to in past. Then after that I took one course and then watched a lot of youtube videos. That kind of helped me move ahead. I find it a bit hard to learn laravel though. It's kind of pain in some aspects.

 

[catgirl]

When I first learned PHP, I started with W3Schools. I am not sure if their tutorials are updated as they used to in past. Then after that I took one course and then watched a lot of youtube videos. That kind of helped me move ahead. I find it a bit hard to learn laravel though. It's kind of pain in some aspects.

The big issue I have with W3 Schools is while they do a good job at teaching concepts and are still great reference material, they stick to very basic language features. Features such as namespaces, scalar type hints, generators, the spaceship operator, REST/SOAP Apis, advanced class features, and much much more isn't covered. These advanced php features are super important in large scale applications and in development jobs. Learning the advanced language features is more important to me. Frameworks are usually well documented so you shouldn't need W3 Schools to learn them, just an understanding of the Model-View-Controller design pattern. (Good explanation here: https://blog.codinghorror.com/understanding-model-view-controller/)

I am hoping to write several forum posts explaining these advanced features over time of course I'll need to write good examples and such which takes time.

 

[Ash]

A mix of W3Schools and some resources that were given by my university. We had coursework for one module where we had to build our own dynamic website and that was quite. Learnt quite a bit about PHP doing that module.