Learning a new programming language can be tough - especially when you're trying to learn it in the abstract. Once you've got the essentials down, the best way to keep learning - and to keep the learning interesting - is by getting your hands dirty with some simple projects. As your projects grow more and more complex, sometimes you'll find yourself grasping at straws while trying to figure out a portion of your project. Enter the great tutorial website, always ready to help you out with some of the trickier aspects of project development. With that in mind, we've put together a list of great sites that offer some of the best tutorials online. It's by no means an exhaustive list, but they're all great starting places.The grandfather of them all is the venerable W3Schools site. You may remember it from the hazy bygone days of learning HTML and CSS, but it's got great resources for many languages, and PHP is right up there with the rest of them. While its tutorials aren't as in-depth as most of the other sites we'll look at, it has some great tutorials and sandboxes for experimenting with different PHP functions, which makes it great for beginners.
One of the newer - and better designed - sites for learning PHP can be found at the Code Academy. It offers a set of 11 unique courses to take you from the very beginnings of PHP with a very hands-on approach, similar to the sandboxes offered by W3Schools but far more advanced. They don't delve as deeply as some of the other sites, but they're great for the basics.
Once you've shaken off the fear of unfamiliar new code and you're ready for something more advanced and intriguing, swing by PHPAcademy. Their tutorial collection is comprised entirely of free videos which are nicely put together. The only downside is that they're relatively new, and are still building up a large repository of content. Regardless, they're definitely worth visiting to start getting your feet wet with some more interesting PHP projects.
Finally, if you've got a bit of money to throw at the learning process, it's worth checking out the resources offered by the ubiquitous Lynda. They've got literally thousands of tutorials under their belts, and while they only offer a few for PHP, they cover all the major aspects of what you need to know to get comfortable with PHP, from working with MySQL to building basic Facebook applications. Their experience with teaching is obvious in every tutorial they host, and once you get hooked you'll want to start learning even more!
