Playing with PHP

So I’ve been slowly making some progress on this project, but having a lot of fun along the way. Just before Christmas I was finally able to work my way through the PHP tutorials track at Codeacademy, so at least I’ve gotten a refresher on syntax.

However what online tools like Codeacademy don’t do for PHP is walk you through the basics of settling up a development environment, really building a test app and taking off the training wheels. There are some good in depth tutorials for Ruby but nothing yet for PHP. Since I’ve never done full fledged PHP development, I’ve got to get fully up to speed.

To get going with real PHP development beyond tutorials I’m going to try a few options. First is to find some more online tutorials and step by step guides. I’m also going to start looking at online development environments, including Cloud9 and Codeanywhere so I’m not limited to a single development machine.

At the same time I’ve had some PHP books that I’ve picked up before this project as well as a few new ones. For example I purchased a few months ago but hadn’t yet really worked through “PHP and MySQL Web Development“. The fourth edition is an older book from 2008 and the fifth edition should be out in early 2015 but it’s at least a more in depth starting point than tutorials. I’ve also got some books on WordPress plugin development which I think will be very helpful, but those will be useful after getting set up and going.

In the next update I’ll talk about setting up a development environment across machines for building a WordPress plugin.