where to begin?

[wongers]

good morning all,

I have recently adopted a new attitude where I wish to better myself in all ways of interest. I wish to improve my skills in web development amongst other things.

When it comes to web development I would say I am an advanced user and have started toying with PHP/MySQL. I have made my own news system where you able to submit news, goes in to a SQL database and then recall it etc etc. basic stuff.

My question is; whats the best way to learn PHP/MySQL? where are the best places to find tutoarials for PHP/MySQL? where did you guys start out?

Would you recommend anything specific?

[Twinkie]

I would recommend simply reading the specification. I have learned from w3schools.com, but the more I coded, the more I realized how little w3schools covered. Do yourself a favor and don't settle for the second best, read the material that all those knockoff tutorials are based on.

If you don't have time for the specification, like I don't, then I recommend getting a book. A good web tutorials will frequently omit information at will when it is not in their scope, to cover only what is practical and simple. A good book will cover a broad amount of topics briefly, giving you a foundation of which to improve yourself in the future. One that I have read and recommend is 'Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One'.

Nothing can replace the specification, and it saves time to read it first.

[misson]

When it comes to relational databases, Codd's "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" is the seminal work. It doesn't cover many of the normal forms, and it's not easy to learn from unless you're used to academic papers. It is, however, very short (11 pages) for the amount of material it covers. I rather like the approach to relational languages in chapters 5 through 8 of Maurer and Scherbakov's "From Databases to Hypermedia" (there's a newer version at "Introduction to Databases and Relational Data Model"), though they miss on a few points (e.g. the assertions in section 6.1 that the desired results aren't expressible by basic operations, when two of them are).

See also "Want to learn to program...." and "sql database".

[farscapeone]

For tutorials and articles I would recommend nettuts+. When they make a tutorial about something it's as good as it gets because they do it form bigging to the end flowed by a full source code you can test. On the other hand they make tutorials for useful things like how to make a login system. The site is not only for PHP but you can filter it easily on the tutorial page. They have video podcast too.

Anyway, PHP has it's own excellent documentation you can find at http://php.net/ You can use it online or you can download it form http://www.php.net/downloads.php

On the other hand I recommend some book like John Wiley and Sons - PHP5 and MySQL Bible or something. I also enjoyed learning from PHP and MySQL books by Vikram Vaswani. My first PHP book was How to do everything with PHP & MySQL from him and, if I remember correctly (it was a long time ago) it's good and have some nice example scripts.

Books are good when seriously you start learning a new programming language, especially those that have good, real world, examples.