My First PHP - Learning PHP/New Project

[Arielle]

Hey folks,
I'm probably an intermediate web developer. I've got a bit of Cold Fusion, .NET, Java, (and of course Javascript, html, css, etc) under my belt but despite all of this fountain of knowledge my latest client is very adament that this site of his will be done in PHP 5.2

I've been told that PHP is very similar to C++ in a lot of ways so I'm not anticipating a whole lot of issues picking it up but I would love a good book to use as a resource. A beginner or intermediate level book with examples is preferred if anyone has any suggestions (or websites) to point me in the right direction.

I've got to get started very quickly because my deadline is early February (about a month away) and I just barely have the preliminary designs done.
Yay for deadlines!

[acoder]

Hey folks,
I'm probably an intermediate web developer. I've got a bit of Cold Fusion, .NET, Java, (and of course Javascript, html, css, etc) under my belt but despite all of this fountain of knowledge my latest client is very adament that this site of his will be done in PHP 5.2

I've been told that PHP is very similar to C++ in a lot of ways so I'm not anticipating a whole lot of issues picking it up but I would love a good book to use as a resource. A beginner or intermediate level book with examples is preferred if anyone has any suggestions (or websites) to point me in the right direction.

I've got to get started very quickly because my deadline is early February (about a month away) and I just barely have the preliminary designs done.
Yay for deadlines!

I don't know about a good book, but the documentation at http://www.php.net is very good (a lot better than the Coldfusion documentation!). The comments are pretty good under each function - they can help in solving a lot of problems.

See http://www.php.net/manual/en/ for the manual and there is also a simple tutorial to get you started.

[ronverdonk]

Difficult choice, There are a number of good PHP books, e.g.

Learning PHP 5 - David Sklar (O'Reilly ISBN 0-596-00560-1)
Beginning PHP5, Apache, MySQL Web Development - Elisabeth Naramore e.a. (Wrox ISBN 0-7645-7966-5)
Advanced PHP Programming - George Schlossnagle (Developer's Library ISBN 0-672-32561-6)

There are a lot more web tutorials for beginners, e.g.

Intro to PHP
W3CSchools PHP Intro
PHP 101: PHP For the Absolute Beginner
Learn PHP
PHP Tutorials

Ronald :cool: