PHP - What total beginners book?

craptakular · 30 Sep 2010 at 23:10

Not interested in other languages, well maybe a bit of JQuery..

I'm new to programming an essentially only really need to add custom modules into wordpress and how to do tables with tables...

Anyone recommend a beginners book?

FabienO · 1 Oct 2010 at 08:52

Books are good, but start with tutorials on the internet. Any beginner tutorial. Then progress to making small things like a image rotator etc etc.

helium · 1 Oct 2010 at 14:23

Having a full understanding of html and CSS will probably help. I found the way i learnt best (after i had learnt the very basics) was downloading a pre made script and then customising how it worked to suit my needs.

sparkey196 · 2 Oct 2010 at 08:40

helium said:
Having a full understanding of html and CSS will probably help. I found the way i learnt best (after i had learnt the very basics) was downloading a pre made script and then customising how it worked to suit my needs.

Although it is good to have fully working examples to hand, simply modifying someone elses code will lead to gaps in your understanding and will ultimately slow your progress

If you are a real beginner then a book might be a good idea. Make sure it is up to date and covers PHP5/OOP concepts in detail.

I always recommend the Nettuts Codeigniter From Scratch video series if you want to get up and running quickly. At the very least, codeigniter forces you into using a half decent coding pattern.

craptakular · 2 Oct 2010 at 22:59

cheers guys! Need to learn html and css, booked myself on a very basic web page course at college so hopegully that will get me started on html.

Found a few books on html and css, but am struggling to understand float and positioning..

As for PHP I think I'm gonna park it until I'm pretty ok with html and css. I'll always use joomla/wordpress but I am really gonna struggle with wordpress static pages hehe.

PHP I wanted to learn so I could build simple tables in PHP and call them into positions in wordpress.