php kickstart for noob?

[victoryrun]

Oh please let the PHP Gods help me with this.

I'm only a little designer with not much grasp on php. I've read books and looked at online tuts but MAN does it usually go over my head. If anybody could help me generalize something to try and make sure I'm on the right track, I'd appreciate it!

I'm wanting to start designing websites in php so that my clients can update them. I've looked at tons of scripts but everything is wayyyyy too detailed. I just want simple edit features, and I'd like to try writing something myself. What's the best way to approach this?

Sorry for the generalized question. Thanks.

[JamShady]

I found a good book to be an invaluable resource. No point in naming the book now, it's obselete, but once you get started, PHP is fairly simple. The author was W.J.Gilmore who I believe also writes articles for devshed or phpdevelopers, or one of those sites, I forget which.

[dreamcatcher]

Another possible solution is to look at the many free CMS (Content Management Systems) that are around. Mambo is terrific, as are many others. Of course this won`t learn you much PHP as everything is already written, but you can easily put together a dynamic site which will impress the clients and keep costs down. Not to mention shorten coding time.

My advice would be to think up a little project for yourself, such as a guestbook script and try writing that. Once you see things start to happen you`ll find yourself getting addicted. Advice is always available here on Webmaster World if you get stuck.

Another good learning curve is to download other people`s scripts, see how the code is written and try and understand how it works. PHP is a relatively easy programming language to grasp. I did a Java course for 12 months and felt like throwing my laptop out the window on several occasions. PHP was like a breath of fresh air once I started with it.

Good luck.

dc

[mcibor]

There are many sites which teach php from scratch. you can try out google first: [google.com...] and then, when you grasped the basics I found this page invaluable: [php.net...] - it's really php manual and certainly this forum where you can look through the library [webmasterworld.com...] and ask as much questions as you wish.

Good luck on your way to server side programming.
Michal Cibor

PS. I myself learned basics from a book 300 scripts, or sth like that, but any other would suffice as well. Just look in your local library - they may just have it.

[jatar_k]

this thread will get you going victoryrun

[webmasterworld.com...]

the other thing is you may not need to make something everytime you need a feature. Maybe a cms here, an upload script there.

Some things you want to do can be ripped out of existing scripts. Seldom are there things that no one has done, they may just exist as part of something else.