Want to learn PHP programming.

But for me 90% of learning php was trying to find help by googling for people that already solved the problem I was facing. Sure I learned from video courses and read tutorials on the net but that only gets you so far.

Googling answers is certainly an effective way to solve php questions, but then going to a tutorial (at least for me) helped me understand the fundamentals/terminology of what I just learned.

So now we have OP here that wouldn't even take 5 minutes to do a quick search to find an answer using google. This thread has been open literally thousands of times and there are hundreds of blog posts dedicated to answering it. He'd find better and more detailed posts. It's just an indication that if he's too lazy to find this, how will he ever find the energy/will to do the same task dozens and dozens of times a day for weeks once he gets into programming.

It's not laziness, it's using a forum to obtain help that's current. You can google "PHP tutorials" and find 50 of them all created at different times. You can google php forums/blogs and search posts for the top tutorials. Or you can take 60sec to ask a forum what their favorite tutorials are, and possibly find a new or highly recommended resource.

Of course the question has been asked 100 times, but who knows if a new member/answer/tutorial will exist today instead of X months ago when the last "What php tutorial?" thread was made.

Saying somebody is destined to fail because they asked a forum full of programmers where to get started in programming is laughable.
 


I have 3 O'Reilly PHP books covering different aspects of PHP, I don't really use them.

Tizag, Stackoverflow and doing exactly what -Matt- said is how I learned.

He didn't say it to me at the time, I figured that part out on my own.
 
I had to edit a header and functions PHP script today for a wordpress of mine. It took me about 2 hours to get this damn slider to apply to specific pages. I managed to do it, but came out with a stress headache.

I am just mind bobbled at the amount of code there was, not being able to make sense of anything, and just knowing that missing a tiny bracket can break the whole site.

I've always said that I wanted to learn PHP, but man I had so much trouble with some basic copy/paste and code editing that it really made my question my potential to understand programming. Even when I was younger and didn't know HTML/CSS (I know I know, it's not programming), I still was able to make some sort of since looking at it. I never felt like any of the code made any sense.

Really questioned my ability to learn code today >.>
 
FWIW, I hate dealing with WordPress although there are some attractive features.
My WordPress sites, I normally set up, theme it and post/page as needed.
 
I have over 20 books on programming and use google to read 100s of sites about programming...

The "technical" side is EASY it's the theories, and style that take a while to actually perfect, and learn and then IMPROVE upon.

You really don't need anyone to suggest anything as you should be able to learn 1 or 2 things from each resource out there. Then you put things together and make what you want, and learn the big picture. If you can't do this then you are missing the bigger picture, and that's what MOST of us are getting at.

The information is out there, and you can learn it if you actually get your ass in gear, and put effort into it vs. jut asking and trying to take short cuts and learn 'fast and easy'.

The thing is... with programming 1 book 10 books, you won't learn it all it's about solving problems the BEST way possible, and growing, and learning more and more and how to IMPROVE on what's been done, or what's "standard".





Back to your scheduled hand holding...
 
Pro Tip: before you output a variable to a page, check it with isset(). Also use tail to watch your server error logs; even if you have error reporting turned on, it may not show on the page.