Forgive me if thiis seems out of place but how and where have you guys picked up your php? And how long didi it take?

I split your post from the original thread so that you would have your own thread.

As for where and when I learned...it was a couple of years ago, when I was fighting with Perl for a database on a site. I fought with it for a couple of months, struggling to make things work (they would work fine on one server, but when I moved to another server, wouldn't work).

It became apparent that I was getting nowhere. And a friend of mine told me I oughtta try PHP. Picked up a couple of books, SAMS Teach Yourself PHP, and PHP & MySQL for Dummies...not to mention the endless amount of resources online (although, there are more now then there were a couple of years ago). It was actually easier for me to scrap what I had in Perl, and to start from scratch with PHP.

I'm still learning...

Frankly speaking
I learned PHP first from webmaster-talk.com
I posted a thread to write a simple code to process data from a form submitted and store it in a database
The first thing that i learned and for which i got attracted towards is The $_POST[] array
I did not know any dbms before took up a project to build a website
And since then I visit zend.com almost daily to learn php
it's been only about two months

Still learning...

Generally use online tutorials as and when required, also ask the odd questions in forums such as this.

From two or three sites and some books.

The sites:
www.sitepoint.com
www.phpbuilder.com
www.phpfreaks.com

Books:
Professional PHP Programming by Wrox Press
Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL by O'Reilly.
The PHP Anthology by Sitepoint.com

I learned a fair amount about PHP and MySQL from the error-riddled, but easy-to-understand, PHP & MySQL for Dummies. But for most of the PHP syntax I just transferred over my Java knowledge and picked up the rest by asking questions.

Conker

www.phpbuilder.com

I went thru their tutorials back a few years ago to get me started and just pretty much taught myself the rest. It's a lot of research but well worth it.

I decided to learn PHP, MySQL and Apache all at once. I picked up a few books and I will recommend two of them to you:

Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache
PHP Functions

The "Teach Yourself" book was great and if you have any programming experience, you can blow through it very quickly. If you don't, it takes you every step of the way and is a great learning text. It teaches you to download, install and configure all three applications so that you can start full-fledged development right on your own machine. Without a place to write and test scripts, you will never really learn any of these tools.

The PHP Functions book is just an amazing reference of every imaginable PHP function. The book is divided by functional area, such as MySQL functions, String functions, etc.

I only started learning PHP after joining Webmater-talk..

Before joining I though PHP would be too complicated and never bothered looking into it.. and now after learning PHP Im able to things on my site I never thought possible before

Ive mainly learnt from..
Webmaster-talk
Php.net
Phpreaks.com

So far its only took 5 months to get where I am now

--James

We recently released an online guide for learning PHP:

Video PHP Tutorial

Hope it helps!

The best place for reference is:

PHP Manual

It is trial and error, but if you have patience you will be learning the next generation of web language.

Good Luck

Steve.

Originally Posted by ResourceIndex

We recently released an online guide for learning PHP:

Video PHP Tutorial

Hope it helps!

Hey, nice guides! Great job guys

"PHP Manual with Help notes" - It did a great job in learning PHP. It still helps me whenever I face PHP problems.

Other resources.
Sourceforge.net Opensource applications
Hotscripts
PHPBuilder
EvilWalrus

And many more...

"Video PHP Tutorial" is great. Good job my friend.

Originally Posted by ResourceIndex

We recently released an online guide for learning PHP:

Video PHP Tutorial

Hope it helps!

Good videos.. Ill have to watch them sometime

I bet many people will find them useful

--James

Hehe, I came back today hoping you would find this useful and not think it was spam! Glad it was accepted as a worthy resource!

When I started to learn PHP, I already had experience in programming languages such as C++, PERL, and JavaScript....So I already knew the terms and stuff about programming....then I learned the syntax of PHP from lycos uk's tutorial. Then I just search at google for tutorials about specific topic about PHP, and I learn my functions from PHP.net's function reference....