How long learn php

I understand the idea of programming and I am able to apply my knowledge from PHP to other languages, which is what is ideal when learning a language. I would highly recommend PHP for dummies. It is the simplest book I have been able to find. I read it in about a month, and was able to make a website with some PHP functions right after with help of the book. The main thing to remember is not to give up if you have trouble. Most coders including myself develop bad habits with experience.

Make sure you learn from a professionally written book. Excellent post Nathan, this certainly applies with me. I started looking into PHP about 1 year or so ago with no programming background. I learnt it as I needed to, i. Took me about 4 months still learning I wrote a couple sites myself already but i spent about hours a day looking at scripts and reading e-books and looking at php. You must keep in mind that all of our minds are different. I have no problem retaining information and utilizing it from just seeing it once, perhaps a year later.

Just a gift I have. Others are different. You may be able to get a great grasp on it within a month. If you have experience in other languages — you are at a definite advantage. I know people who get stuck on relatively simple concepts arrays, loops, etc and it takes a month for them to get it straight in their head.

You can rest assured that whatever you do to the code you will be editing, you won't be able to take the whole BitDegree website down so experiment. By the way, if the course exceeds a bit your finances at the moment, you can try to apply for BitDegree micro-scholarships.

A sponsor might fund your course fees and help you out with a little reward at the end! If you have a couple of ideas on how to solve a problem and the first one works, make sure you try your second idea too, rather than simply advancing. In web development, there's usually more than one way to solve a problem. If you are going to break things, it may be wise to make sure error reporting is enabled.

This may well be enabled by default, but in some instances when you break your PHP application, all you will see is a blank screen. To see an error report, ensure that you turn to enable error handling in your php. In both your coding education and your life as a professional developer, you will lose hours of your life to syntax errors. A syntax error just means you wrote something that PHP didn't understand.

It could be because you spelled the name of a variable differently from how you did when you created it, or you forgot to put a semicolon at the end of your statement. You're going to forget that semicolon a lot. Some programming languages, such as JavaScript, are more liberal on the use of semicolons than a language like PHP is. In some cases PHP can be quite liberal too: for instance, it is considered good practice in some situations to not close your PHP tags.

In other situations, one missing semicolon kills the whole application. So be very careful with your syntax. In programming, it's imperative to spell things correctly. But this knowledge of the probability of syntax errors is useful. It tells us where to look first when your program doesn't work.

Before deleting your whole program and starting again, check for a syntax error. As you learn to code, you will be learning from instructors that take great care with the presentation of their code. And if you're not At first, all the spacing, indentations and alignment might seem superficial.

If the code works, it works, right? Who cares about the spacing? Well, when you make a mistake or come back to the review the code you wrote a while ago, you will care. Worse still, if your colleagues have to work with your code that you haven't kept readable, you will care even more, because your colleagues will hate you.

Well-Written code is essential for dealing with the errors discussed in tip 7. If you put all your code on one line, the computer will be able to read it just fine.

But if you've missed a semicolon, you or someone else has to spot that. Which example would be easier to spot a missing semi-colon in? In case that isn't obvious, it's the same code. The only difference is the spacing. PHP and closing? The second version is just all the code rammed together. Now you have to check all the code for potential missing semi-colons rather than just taking a quick look at the end of the line.

Where do the PHP tags start and end? They have their lines in version one, but you have to scan all of the code from opening tag to closing tag in version two of the code to check they are both there. In addition to keeping your code clean, clear and readable, be sure to make use of comments to remind yourself what you were thinking when you wrote your code.

Comments are lines of text that are ignored by the PHP interpreter. You can turn your text into a comment by including two forward slashes at the start of the line.

The computer completely ignores your comments, making them seem kind of pointless. But while code is for the computer, the comments are for the humans. Particularly if you write something complex, comments can be extremely useful for either other people or yourself in the future to understand or remember what your program does.

For example, below I wrote a comment above this Wordpress custom query to remind me what it is when I learned it. Comments can be a great way to leave little notes for yourself to help you remember how to do things. As a newbie, you are very likely to re-visit the code you write now in the future.

When someone asks you to build something you've built before, referring to the code you wrote and understood before can be easier to use than trying to understand someone else example you found via Google. Well, it will only be easier if your code is clean, clear, easy to understand and makes good use of comments. Now, there's nothing wrong with asking for help. A lot of people would say it should be encouraged. But if you ask someone as soon as you get stuck, you're not going to learn the lesson anywhere near as well as you would have done had you figured out the problem yourself.

There is a right time to ask a question. This might seem like more of an issue at a coding boot camp in real life, rather than online, as in a boot camp you can raise your hand and ask an instructor for help. However, courses like those on BitDegree give you the option to send feedback on any lecture in the course so that the instructor can help you with any problems you encounter.

But remember, when you are learning PHP , you aren't blazing a trail — you are not the first person to learn this programming language. Plenty of people went before you, and their questions are all over the internet. There are also plenty of people who want to help, and their answers are also all over the internet. Particularly if you are near the beginning of your learning experience, studying PHP basics, it's extremely unlikely your problem hasn't been encountered before by someone else.

So, if you want to find an answer to any problem you have with PHP, then just do what you do to solve all your other problems. Google it! At the top of the search results, you will find that someone has probably posted an eerily similar question to yours on Stackoverflow. If you can't find a match to your question, it's also worth remembering that PHP, like every other programming language, has extensive documentation to help its users understand how to use PHP.

One difficulty you may encounter early on when learning PHP is the technical language used by your instructors or in instructions. A good instructor will be able to explain the PHP basics to you in plain English. But once you get on to more advanced topics, the instructor will need to use more technical language to describe concepts of greater complexity. It's important that you learn the words in your new vocabulary sufficiently to be able to understand sentences that might use two or more jargon words in them.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely you will ever fully understand how to use PHP unless you can understand the difficult concepts behind it, and that means learning a technical language. A simple example would be understanding 'how to pass a variable as an argument to your function.

BitDegree's 'Learn PHP Online' Course covers the concepts of variables, functions, and arguments as part of its curriculum on PHP basics, so by the end of the course, that sentence should make perfect sense to you. If you're afraid that could prove difficult, then consider noting down what each jargon word means when you come to them, to be able to review them when an instructor uses a sentence like that later in your PHP education.

Want to become a Python expert? No problem! Here's an extensive list of the best Python classes available right now! Not sure what the top blockchain jobs are? Read the article and find out! How do you choose the best CSS preprocessor? First, read the operators documentation to understand what operators are and how they work in PHP. Just focus on the most important operators, the ones you will use from the start:.

Your goal is to discover what you can do with PHP and understand its potential. Then, move on to functions. Focus on the basics:. Strings are extensively used in web programming and t he PHP standard library includes many string-handling functions that you will use very often. You are going to add some additional functionalities using operators, custom function definitions and string-handling functions.

You can do whatever you want, just think of a nice functionality to include in your backend and try to implement it. It can also be something completely useless but funny.

If you need some inspiration, look at the following example: It reads a value from the request string like an input value from an HTML form and prints the even characters only. This example uses some operators increment, string concatenation, arithmetic a couple of string functions and it also shows how to write a user-defined function:. Object-oriented programming is an important programming paradigm used my many modern languages. Your goal is to grasp the basic concepts and learn how to use them in practice.

Again, go back to your exercise and start practicing with OOP. A very simple one will do, but practice as much as you can. For example, you can turn the HTML form into a login form with a username field and a password field, then write a very simple authentication class in your PHP backend.

You should try doing it on your own, but feel free to share your results in the comments or on my Facebook group. PHP uses Sessions to keep track of consecutive remote user access. You can go straight to my Sessions complete guide to learn how to use Sessions in practice and to see some code examples. If you created an authentication class as OOP exercise, you could use Sessions to remember user accesses.

Otherwise, a simpler exercise is to remember all the values sent through the HTML form and print the list at every page load:. Imagine a database as a set of tables. Explaining databases is far beyond the scope of this guide, but you can find a lot of excellent tutorials online. I want you to get the most out of your 5 days learning session.

Designed by Freepik. The life of a web developer is complicated. With so many languages to learn, it can be difficult to focus on just one. During these 5 days, you will probably be tempted to look at other languages like JavaScript or Python or to try using some PHP framework.

Your brain will learn better and faster if you do so. Countless studies and books like the excellent Deep Work by Cal Newport clearly show how these distractions are much more harmful than we think, especially when we need to focus on an intellectual work.

Learning a new programming language in just a few days requires a high level of attention and focus, and distractions can very easily take them away from you. Reading the documentation chapters and the examples is not enough , even if you understand everything you read. For your brain to really learn a concept, that concept must be stored in memory and then retrieved multiple times.

The more you recall something the more you will remember it this is the fundamental theory behind many learning strategies like spaced repetition. Sometimes you may be tempted to skip doing the exercises, especially if you understood perfectly the theory. But if you do so, you will probably forget everything in a couple of days. In this step-by-step tutorial you have learned how to get started with PHP, including how to install a development environment and a code editor.

The 5 days learning program explained in this guide will let you acquire the right basic skills, the ones you will use right away in your first PHP applications, without wasting your time. Did you try this learning program or something else? And how did it go? If this guide has been helpful to you, please spend a second of your time to share it… thanks!

Hello, I guess you need to look for another developer or to outsource the job to a development team. If your previous developer is able to offer some support even just a phone call to describe how the app works that would save a lot of time. Thanks for sharing this step by step information about PHP and read your complete post, you have explained in really very understanding method so keep posting such informative blog post.

Thanks For Sharing such a wonderful article the way you presented is really amazing It was extraordinarily simple to discover my way around and amazingly clear, this is staggering!!!

Enjoyed reading the article above, really explains everything in detail, the article is very interesting and effective. Thank you and good luck with the upcoming articles. Hello Dear, Thanks for the sharing this thing I like it and I definitely follow your point and thank you for help. Keep up the good work! I have learnt php but I have a problem to write a php code I confused at the time to write a code so what can I do? Hello Gaurav. Hello, Start from a very simple script and follow this guide.

If you are stuck somewhere feel free to let me know. Really happy that I get to find your blog on how to learn PHP. These are must read for all. This article is a good one to look at. You will get best review over here and would suggest others too.

Great blog indeed, will visit again future to read new stuff!! Thank you for all of this. Hi Areeba, This article provides quite a bit of learning material. Did you already go through all of it? Do you have some doubt you would like to clear? If you are ready to go further, there are more advanced topics you can cover, like OOP, scalability and security. You can join my newsletter to receive some advice and to get some inspiration on how to go on.

Most companies are clueless over the choice on which technology they should use in order to create the best application. May i have view on Python? Thanks Alex! Python is a more general purpose language. Thanks for sharing such a useful information. Thank You, Technobridge. Hey Jackson, if you want to learn more, you can subscribe to my newsletter to get my weekly tips, advice and suggestions.

Thank you sir, it has not been easy for me to get through. But I think the steps here are very encouraging to start with as a bigginer thank u. Hi, thank you for your comment. I think starting with PHP 5 is not a good idea. I suggest you go with PHP 7 right away. However, be sure to understand the PHP basics first. Very Awesome article. Your simple explanation and step by step planning to learn a language is great and needs admiration.

Absolutely awesome article! Great Article.