PHP - A New Start in my development

Using PHP to develop websites

So here I was, a brand new book (PHP 4/MySQL by Larry Ullman for Peachit Press) in front that promised me how to learn PHP and create dynamic websites. I had, of course already created dynamic website using classic ASP but I wanted to use PHP and use it well. Many of the concepts mentioned early on in the book just reiterated how to do things that were already common to most programming languages. The common if, else, echo and so on and so forth and these chapters were a breeze and I sailed through the first few chapters in a matter of hours.

However when I started to meet new ideas and concepts I was starting to slow down as the new information had to absorbed and understood for future use. Things like arrays and functions were, though not ultra complicated were new to me as I had learnt ASP in such a disjointed way that this new approach was very heavy going.

With functions in PHP there were new ideas and concepts that had to be understood - like variables within a functions, parameters and the idea of whether or not it is even worth writing the function in the first place! When it came to arrays and using them in PHP, this was such a refreshing change. I had used arrays in ASP but they were, I felt a little clunky, with PHP they feel flexible and you can manipulate them in so many ways (thanks to PHP's inbuilt functions).

I have to say Larry Ullman is an excellent teacher and his books are very, very good and without him I think learning PHP would have been a lot more difficult, so thanks go out to him. I have bought many of his books and it's a testament to his skill at writing technical text books that I keep buying updated versions as there are so many useful bits of information in them.