Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve received a number of emails from those of you in the 8BIT community that are looking for some good resources for learning PHP.
It can be difficult to make suggestions especially when we’re all coming from varying degrees of experience, but there are three books that I’ve found useful over the past several years that I’d recommend to anyone looking to get into writing PHP regardless of level of experience.
1. Head First PHP & MySQL
The Head First series of books are killer especially if you’re new to a given language. They’re approach is unique within this space and is far from the dry content of many technical books.
Topics are generally broken down in chapters that can be read and studied within an hour and provide solid exercises for trying out what you’ve learned.
Plus, there’s bonus content for MySQL in here, too.
2. PHP5 – Visual Blueprint
The Blueprint Series of books are a bit more dry that the Head First series but they provide extremely good examples with line-by-line code examples and screenshots.
Each chapter is normally divided into very narrow topics over a specific case. Reading this book cover to cover will definitely expand your ability with what you’re able to do with common web-based development tasks.
3. Programming PHP
Programming PHP is a typical O’Reilly book – it’s thick, it’s dense, it covers a ton of material, and it serves its purpose as a tremendous reference book.
I wouldn’t start this book unless you’re a beginner that’s gone through the previous two suggestions or you’re an experienced developer looking to quickly pick up another language.
These three books are all ones that I can vouch for as I’ve used them (or other books in the same series) at some point in my career and found them to be valuable in getting comfortable with development.
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