PHP Resources
I put a list together for a friend of some good PHP resources, thought I’d stick it up here as well:
Of course, the best resource, the official docs:
http://www.php.net
Another great (official) place:
http://talks.php.net/
The talks are by the creators of PHP. Any talks by Rasmus Lerfdorf are excellent, he stresses simplicity over complexity. He’s also the creator of PHP. Derick Rethans is also an excellent presenter, he focuses a lot on security and debugging. Definitely watch the presentations in the “Security” section of the talks, but overall, any talk in there has information you can use to your advantage.
Other sites:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/24/10-useful-php-tips-revisited/
http://php.about.com/od/advancedphp/Advanced_PHP.htm
Sitepoint is where I first started learning HTML and CSS many years ago:
http://www.sitepoint.com/subcat/php-tutorials
MVC tutorials (how apps should be coded; obviously there’s some contention between OO and procedural styles, but you need knowledge of both to be able to make an educated judgment about what a good balance between the two is)
http://www.phpro.org/tutorials/Model-View-Controller-MVC.html
Good to go through to understand MVC completely
CakePHP has a good introduction:
http://book.cakephp.org/view/10/Understanding-Model-View-Controller
Which brings me to CakePHP itself. It’s an excellent MVC framework; after trying out CodeIgniter, Zend, Yii, Kohana, I’ve settled on Cake.
http://cakephp.org/
SQL resources – the best is the manual. Learning the concepts behind joins is essential and important. A good tutorial:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000976.html
Also database design:
http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/ten-common-database-design-mistakes/
http://woork.blogspot.com/2008/09/10-useful-articles-about-database.html
Following that up are good ORM, which you may want to use as your database layer. CakePHP has ORM built-in, but sometimes all you need is just a DB layer.
http://www.doctrine-project.org/
For conventions, I tend to follow the CakePHP model (since that’s the framework I use the most):
http://book.cakephp.org/view/24/Model-and-Database-Conventions
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/view/database-design-and-cakephp
http://book.cakephp.org/view/22/CakePHP-Conventions
And then rounding it out, some general knowledge information:
http://articles.sitepoint.com/category/html
http://articles.sitepoint.com/category/javascript
http://articles.sitepoint.com/category/cssh
http://www.jquery.com
