Learning PHP : Beginner Tutorials

At some point, people who have some knowledge of HTML and/or CSS eventually need to do more, and usually they start wondering if they should learn PHP. Most, in fact, have already played around with it a little because they’ve made some minor adjustments to existing PHP code in WordPress, forum software, or some other application written in PHP. Still, making a few tweaks here and there to existing code, and writing an entire application from scratch are very different, and that’s when many wonder how they would go from point A to point B in order to really learn PHP (and MySQL).

The leap from HTML and CSS to PHP can be fairly wide, so I’ve tried to compile resources specifically to help the true PHP beginner.

Of course, as with all things, there are scads of tutorials on both PHP and MySQL on the web, but that doesn’t mean all are really exceptional - especially for the newb beginner. Frankly, I’ve never found an online tutorial that introduces the generic “concepts” of programming very well, and that would be a great first step. Although the following tutorial gets a little technical, especially towards the end, I recommend reading through it if only to grasp the basic theories that it presents. Don’t worry if you don’t understand it all. Just use it as an overview guide before plunging into PHP specifics.