Learning PHP

Hi all, first post so be nice! hehe

Just started university and the uni has changed the course structure so now the course I'm doing (comp science) will do python, c++ and front end website HTML/CSS. I was really hoping to do PHP/JavaScript/SQL on the course so I can advance and become a web developer.

I was just wondering how easy it is too pickup PHP and JavaScript? I was thinking about over the xmas/summer just going through the PHP manual and self teaching myself just like I did with MSL & HTML/CSS.

Anyway, any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

They're probably going to teach you web development using Python instead of PHP. Python is a great language with a growing following.

If you still want to learn PHP, the best way is to get a real book (like the O'Reilly PHP/MySQL book) and work through it, trying out all the examples. You can also stay on the forums for a while and read about best practices and how to fix common problems.

There's a new user guide as well which will help you with getting started posting and solving common questions.

If you already know C or C++, PHP will not be a difficult language to learn. The concepts, syntax and standard library are all pretty similar.

You'll probably find JavaScript to be a bit more difficult for a variety of reasons not directly related to the language itself.

Simple SQL is not difficult to learn at all because it's so simple, but more complicated SQL requires a radically different thought approach than any of the other languages you mentioned because it's a declarative language rather than a procedural one (Python, C++, PHP and JavaScript are all procedural).