Best tips for learning PHP

Before start learning PHP, take a moment to plan your approach to learning this programming language. Professional developers who have learned PHP have already spent a large number of hours mastering this skill. To emulate them, you need to make sure you are highly motivated and, more importantly, willing to invest a lot of time to learn PHP quickly and efficiently. 

The slower and inefficient your learning methods are, the longer it will take you to get a job in PHP development or create the app you want. The worst thing about slow and inefficient learning is that there is a high probability that you will give up your effort completely. Research from Harvard University and MIT has found that only 4% of students who enroll in online courses complete them.

Tips for learning PHP programming

Make sure you want to learn PHP

If you came across this article as a novice programming user, you probably don't have any preferences regarding the programming language what you want to learn. This isn't necessarily a problem, but it can create a problem later when you discover that a different programming language suits your goals much better.

PHP is a server-side programming language widely used in web development. If you find that in the coming months you prefer to work at Rockstar and help build the next version of Grand Theft Auto, you would have been better off learning C or C++. These languages ​​are used much more frequently in game development.

However, there are many good reasons for PHP:

• You want to take your WordPress knowledge to the next level. As of September 2018, 7% of all websites use WordPress. Since WordPress is powered by PHP, there is a huge demand for PHP developers. If you want to use other content management systems like Joomla or Drupal, you should know that these were also created with PHP.
• Compared to other programming languages, PHP is considered relatively easy to learn.
• Because PHP is native to the web, you can get simple projects online much faster and with less difficulty. For you, this means that you will see the results of your efforts much faster than if you had to learn another language.

So before you start learning PHP, make sure it suits your needs and future projects.

Monitor your projects

Now that you're sure you want to learn PHP, it's also very helpful to have a goal. Learn PHP It will be a long process that will be easier as long as you are motivated because you have an end goal in mind. Online courses keep the learning process interesting and interactive as you create a project and learn the basics of PHP development. This is a good way to make the learning process interesting and understandable.

But it's even better if you keep an eye on your own project. This gives you more incentive to remember what you've learned if you want to apply it to your project. You have to continually practice your newly developed PHP skills. This is usually easier with your own project. You can also create different versions of your project as your skills improve. 

For example, you can create a simple contacts app that has basic functionality for adding and deleting contacts. When you have learned more skills, you can connect the application to a database. You can add advanced features later before launching the app and invite your friends to fill in their details. Before you know it, you could already be the owner of one of the largest social media websites in the world, connecting over a billion people and generating billions in advertising revenue, who knows?

Learn HTML first

While PHP is a great choice as your first programming language, it shouldn't be your first step toward Web development. If you still can't, spend some time with HTML before starting PHP. HTML is more of a the language de marked than a programming language and forms the basis of websites. This means that the code you write represents the basic elements of a website, such as images or text. You can't program functions with a markup language, which makes learning relatively easy. 

To make websites more dynamic, a language like PHP should be used in addition to HTML. Since PHP is generally used to make HTML more dynamic, HTML is often embedded in PHP documents. However, HTML is not only present in most PHP applications, but is also part of many tutorials and lessons on learning PHP. 

Some of these tutorials require you to already have some knowledge of HTML. Instead of doing both at once, first take a few hours to learn the basics of HTML. Learning PHP will take months, but HTML really only takes a few hours to understand and use.

Active learning is better than passive learning

One of the best ways to make your learning more effective It is learning actively rather than passively. Passive learning means that you simply assimilate information by looking at it, reading it, or listening to it. Active learning means that you apply what you learn directly to a project.

Educators agree that active learning strategies are better than passive ones. The only problem is that creating an active learning experience is often more difficult. An example of a passive learning experience would be watching a YouTube video with a teacher speaking in a presentation and explaining the features to you. 

These learning experiences passive They can still be very useful. Maybe your YouTube teacher will offer you the best explanation you've ever heard. Therefore, my advice is not to avoid passive learning completely, but to do it actively. You can write the examples from a lecture or video yourself, make changes to the code, and see what happens.

Don't be afraid to disassemble the code

Be careful with this advice. If you're working on a live website, deliberately breaking down PHP code is certainly not the best idea. If you work with WordPress, it is generally recommended to leave PHP files in the WordPress core. Leave these files as is. However, in offline project files that you create yourself or in PHP files in WordPress theme folders, it's not a bad idea to break down the code. You will learn a lot by putting them back together.

So my advice doesn't mean you should take down your own website, it just means you shouldn't be afraid if that happens. When something goes wrong, it's usually a great learning experience. The bigger the problem, the better you will remember the solution.

If you have different ideas to solve a problem and the first one works, be sure to try the second idea instead of moving on. In web development, there are always several ways to solve a problem.

Enable error logging (error messages) in PHP.ini

Whenever you analyze code snippets, make sure error reporting is turned on. It may already be enabled by default, but in some cases you will only see a blank screen when you unmount your PHP application.

PHP syntax is sensitive

Both in your coding education As in your life as a professional developer, you lose many hours of your life due to syntax errors. A syntax error means you wrote something that PHP doesn't understand. This could be because you spelled a variable name differently than when you created it, or because you forgot to insert a semicolon at the end of your declaration. Believe me, you will often forget these semicolons.

Other programming languages, such as JavaScript, use semicolons a little more liberally than PHP. But PHP can also be quite liberal: in some situations it is considered best practice not to close PHP tags. In other situations, however, a missing semicolon terminates the entire application. So be careful with your syntax. It is also important that you distinguish between upper and lower case letters.

However, simply knowing the probability of syntax errors It is usually useful. You know where to look first if your program doesn't work. Before you delete the entire program and restart it, first check for any syntax errors.

Write readable code

When you learn to code, you often learn from teachers who have carefully selected their code examples. And if not…then you should look for another teacher. At first glance, all the spaces, crevices and alignments appear to be superficial. If the code works, then it works, right? Who cares about distance?

Good If you make a mistake or revisit the code you wrote a while ago, you will be interested. Even worse, if your coworkers have to work with your code, which is totally unreadable, you'll take good care of it so your coworkers don't start hating you.

Un well written code It is essential to quickly correct the errors described in the previous tip. If you put all your code on one line, the computer can easily read it. However, if you have forgotten the semicolon, you or someone else will need to find that error.

Try to solve your problems yourself

Often when you encounter a problem, the first reaction is to ask someone for help. There is nothing wrong with asking for help, many people say it should even be encouraged. However, if you always ask someone when you get stuck, you won't learn as much in a lesson as if you solved the problem yourself. Therefore, it always depends on the right time to ask your question. However, this seems to be more of a problem in a coding boot camp than online. 

In the training field, you can raise your hand to ask your teacher for help. Also, always remember: when you learn PHP, you are not a precursor, you are not the first person to learn this programming language. Many people have walked this path before you and your questions are all over the Internet. Of course, there are also many people who want to help and their answers are also on the Internet. You just have to find it.

Especially if you're just starting to learn PHP and are going through the basics, there's a good chance someone else has had your problem before. So if you want to find an answer to your problem with PHP, you should do what you always do when you have a problem. Google it! In the first search results, you will likely find a question similar to yours on Stackoverflow. If you can't find a comparable question, keep in mind that PHP, like any other programming language, has extensive documentation to help users use PHP. 

Understand technical terms

A difficulty that you may encounter at the beginning of the PHP learning It is the technical language used by your teacher or in instructions. However, a good teacher can explain PHP to you in simple language. However, once you get to more advanced topics, your instructor will need to use more technical language to describe more complex concepts.

It is important that you also study your new vocabulary words to understand sentences that use two or more slang words. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to understand PHP if you do not understand the concepts behind it and for that you need the specific language. A simple example would be if you understand “how to pass a variable as an argument to a function.”

Conclusion on PHP Tips

My tips can help you prepare to be a best PHP student and, if you follow them correctly, they will also make your learning process more efficient. While most of the tips are aimed at beginners, advanced PHP students will also find something here and will find some useful tips and advice.

You've probably already done some research and made the decision to learn PHP. If this is the case, there is only one thing left to do… Start learning PHP! Like everything we want to learn, sometimes this can be an overwhelming process. However, it is an exciting journey and in the end you will be rewarded with an extremely good feeling. Follow my advice and you will be on the right path.