PHP books (best?)

[Logician]

Originally posted by FireFly
I must disagree, Logician. PHP is commonly associated with MySQL, but it is just another way -- out of many -- to store data you manipulate with PHP. It is also not really integrated with Javascript, designing or security. (although security should always be in mind when coding, in any language)

If you start with the basics, PHP is really not a hard lanuage to learn, compared to Perl for example.

If you want to play with echo commands, it's sure the very basic and easy language to learn. But if you are learning PHP, it means that you have intentions to write a dynamic web application. (If not, you just picked the wrong language anyway)

Creating a dynamic web aplication has a lot to do learning SQL (My, MS, Oracle, no matter) OR learning file structure/permissions of various systems (nt, unix, linux), know HTML/javascript good, have a very good command of web designing and more importantly web security. All these are advanced topics and if you dont know what a "variable" or "array" is, you will really have serious problems while you dig your way in the PHP.

IMO, for such a newbie PHP is not a good start, he can begin with a language such as "visual" languages (Visual Basic, Delphi for instance) to get the basics of coding. Then learning HTML, SQL and web security must be a great concern before elaborating on web languages such as PHP, Perl or ASP. After getting the basics, learning the PHP will not be a problem for anyone, I agree..

But I really dont know a good PHP coder, who doesnt know any other programming language and started his career with PHP..