Resources for Learning PHP

This chapter assumes that you already know how to use PHP and simply want to learn how to use it with Google Web Services. Consequently, the chapter doesn't include essential language instruction that you might need if you're a PHP novice. If you think you might want to learn to use PHP for your next Web application, the resources in this section will help. One of the first places you should look for PHP information is the PHP site at http://www.php.net/manual/en/introduction.php. Once you spend some time with the PHP tutorial, you'll also want to look at the PHP manual at http://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php. The manual tells you how to use various PHP commands.

Note  

The PHP materials come in languages other than English. All you need to do is change the two-letter language abbreviation in the URL to your language. For example, to see the PHP manual in Spanish, you'd use an URL of http://www.php.net/manual/es/index.php instead of the English URL provided in this chapter. German readers can use the http://www.php.net/manual/de/index.php, while French readers can use http://www.php.net/manual/fr/index.php.

The Webmonkey Web site has an excellent PHP tutorial (http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/48/index2a.html?tw=programming). Another tutorial will help you understand PHP and MySQL Usage (http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/programming/php/tutorials/tutorial4.html). However, you'll also want to view the other PHP topics on this Web site (http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/programming/php/index.html) to learn more about PHP and see how you can use it with other products such as Oracle.

A number of other sites also provide PHP tutorials. For example, the Free Webmaster Help.com site at http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/php provides a seven-part tutorial that includes information on using forms. You'll also find great articles and tutorials on the PHPBuilder site at http://www.phpbuilder.com/. The tutorials on Dev Shed (http://www. devshed .com/Server_Side/PHP/) are a little more advanced. The tutorials on this site help you discover how to work with the local hard drive and even create PDFs as output from your application. You'll also find a number of articles about error handling and other developer topics. However, you'll want to save this site as your last stop because many of the articles get quite detailed and you could find yourself lost quickly.

It's also helpful to have a good book on the topic. Take a look at Creating Interactive Web Sites with PHP and Web Services by Eric Rosebrock (Sybex, 2004). This book shows how to install and configure development and production platforms of Apache, PHP, and MySQL on both Windows and Linux systems, and teaches Web development with PHP from a problem-solving viewpoint. Also visit Eric's wildly popular Web site PHP Freaks (http://www.phpfreaks.com).