What's happening in our world

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!

When you're working on a new project, sometimes it can be frustrating to spend hours working on something, only to find out the next day that someone else has already completed very similar work and made the source code available. Nobody likes wasting time re-inventing the wheel, as anyone who's ever taken advantage of a PHP framework can tell you. With that spirit in mind, here are 5 great PHP tutorials from around the web that you can incorporate into your next project to make it as robust and efficient as possible.

 

1. In the past, we discussed using PHP caching to decrease the load times of your site, but only briefly touched on how to actually go about it. This tutorial gives a simple example, but those of you with some inspiration will be able to expand it to do whatever you want. http://papermashup.com/caching-dynamic-php-pages-easily/

 

2. If you're really hoping to optimise your site's load time, then you'll want to make sure that your files are as small as possible. The best method to do so is by compressing your CSS and JS files with Gzip, which can be done easily in PHP using this simple tutorial. http://papermashup.com/use-php-to-gzip-css-files/

 

3. We also posted recently about security in your PHP applications, and methods of error checking, but that can become even more tricky when your users have to do more than input text. If they are uploading files for your project, check out this tutorial about secure uploads.
http://viralpatel.net/blogs/file-upload-in-php-file-upload-php-file-upload-tutorial-securing-things/

 

4. Again on the security side of things, this tutorial will help you secure your project's login system with various tips and tricks tested and proven by the wider coding community. Take the time to brush up, and protect your work from malicious users. http://hungred.com/useful-information/php-secure-login-tips-and-tricks/

 

5. Finally, to prevent the worst from happening in SQL database crash which could cost you all your hard-won data, use this simple tutorial to create a PHP script to output your database to an XML file which can be reparsed to restore your database. http://davidwalsh.name/backup-database-xml-php

 

Bonus: If that's not quite to your liking, Walsh also offers a tutorial on how to use PHP to export your tables as SQL statements here http://davidwalsh.name/backup-mysql-database-php

There you have it! These simple PHP tutorials can make a huge difference in the way your project development works, ensuring that your project be more secure and more efficient - and save you from spending time developing processes that others have already perfected.