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I do a lot of coding in Ruby on Rail and I’m getting back into PHP for the scripts I give to others. I get asked on a pretty regular basis what is my favorite language.

Rails :)

But PHP is much more practical as your first language for a number of reasons. First off it’s easier to deploy, there is a lot more help out there, and I think it’s easier to learn for those two reasons. A person learning a new language shouldn’t have to figure out how to walk as well — it would be overwhelming. Learning to deploy Ruby is a freakin nightmare if you are a newbie.

Php on the other hand is probably 100 percent on your server already and if you can make your file extensions end in .php you can pretty much handle things from there. Dreamweaver is probably my preferred way to work with php (others like other IDE’s like aptana or eclipse)

When your ready to buy DW — USE MY LINK :)
Dreamweaver CS3 - Full

Hey - a man’s gotta eat :)  Couldn’t help putting that in there - I’m not suggesting that you rush out and buy DW today or anything.  But it’s an invaluable tool for building your sites.  Things like xsitepro only go far.

I’ve put a pretty basic ‘tutorial’ on php up over at other98percent.com in the free section. It’s geared for beginners and you should probably go through that before doing much more.

But let’s say you want to “LEARN” php more thoroughly? Where to go? It really depends on how you learn. I’m a big dork and can’t seem to “learn” (I mean really learn) on-line. I need a ‘book’. And 0′Rielly is probably the brand I would recommend.

If you learn better with video - check out: phpvideotutorials.com. It’s a great little site packed with stuff — not all free I’m afraid. But the free content isn’t bad.

There are also places where they have compiled tutorials and code all together - Robert Plank does this… most of his ’stuff’ doesn’t apply to black hat sites - but I’m sure some of it could apply to your white hat or money sites.  I’ve taken a peek at some of Robert’s earlier stuff and saw some value in it.  Plus he has “Speak The Geek” over there  :)

My point - I suppose it’s that you need to at least know enough PHP to get going…. and I’m going to be using DW and PHP pretty heavily in the future.  The last 10 days of Black Hat Digest training are literally going to be videos of me and DW building sites  (and maybe a few other tools).

  

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