[Bob Burke]

I had already learned Perl (which, incidentally was introduced to me by another well known bulletin board that shall remain nameless) and then I started reading the PHP Manual aswell a tutorials at SitePoint and Devshed, I still haven't bought a PHP book but I consider myself an experienced PHP coder. One of the most important reasons for me to use PHP over Perl was its' vast array of database functions without requiring extra modules and plug-ins.

Anyway, put simply, in my opinion: PHP > Perl. And the best way, in my opinion, to learn PHP is by reading and consulting the PHP Manual, looking at others code and trying to understand it and just keep at it!!

Good luck!
Regards,
Bob Burke (bob@pixel26.net)


p.s. the "Visual Quickstart Guide" books of which your PHP book is one are a good selection of books and the couple I have bought (Perl & CGI for the WWW, Dreamweaver 4) have been excellent. Just my ?0.02