i am looking for the BEST books and online tutorials for

learning PHP

and specifically how to apply this learning to say postnuke
(or phpnuke)

hopefully i could hear from people who have actually built sites in one of the pnuke cms and can provide links to their work.

feedback is greatly appreciated...

regards,

james
solution39.com

:cool: :stickout: :cool:

I cant recommend any books since I havent used any, but you could pick up the PHP manual and tear through it to learn the functions. Its what I started with when I started with PHP.

As far as learning for php/postnuke your best bet is to take a look at their code, which is a mess but thats another discussion. I've done quite a few things for phpnuke myself, but I cant post links to my work here because its forbidden in the rules (at least with the last time I read them), but a google search of my name will help out. ;)

So as far as "best" books are concerned, the manual and actual code was the "best" for me. I'd suggest playing around with it and if you dont feel comfortable with it follow some tutorials online. IMO buying a php book is almost useless due to all the updates and such and stuff being depreciated, etc.

Just my $0.02

Buying a PHP book as a reference is some what useless, but buying one to learn the basic syntax and oddities of the language is very useful, I liked: PHP 5 power programming.

Not everyone learns the same way, so what is a good book for someone might just be the opposite for you.

My recommendation is to take out a trial subscription to the safari online bookshelf and browse through some PHP titles.

A good book often recommended for PHP beginners is 'PHP & MySQL Programming'. I believe now its in its 3rd edition.

As for phpnuke -- I'm not sure how you would want to apply your knowledge. I only took one look at that program and dropped it like a hot rock. If you want to write a module for it, then I suppose you could read up on general PHP syntax and programming. However, I do not know of a book that's specifically targeted to phpnuke (or any other *nuke) -- the discussion of phpnuke is often a hot button for flamewars, so I'm not going to get into that.

Always bookmark the php reference -- its one of the best online references for any scripting language (MHO) and the user comments are very helpful. A shortcut to jump to a particular section is to simply write the function name after the url. php.net/echo for example will take you to echo's manual page. For functions that have underscores in their names, you can use underscores or the dash (-). For example, php.net/mysql-query or php.net/mysql_query

Note that I didn't type www.php.net -- this is intentional. When you just type php.net, the servers will automatically direct you to your nearest mirror.