How Long (Aprox) Does It Take To Learn PHP?

Question

How long (aprox) does it take to learn enough php to think of an idea and know just about how to do it. Thinking of learning it to build sites... just want to get an idea of how much time the learning process averages.

Thanks for any answers!

Answer 1

Hi there,

To answer this question, I believe you need to trace back your programming language back ground and your computer programming experience as well.

For your progrmamming language background, if you know C or Java, or any other C-like programming language, even ASP, it won't take you long to get t know it very well, althought as the other answer comments, to master the APIs and libraries, it really depends on what you need to use. If it is for example a typical HTTP Server/MySQL/PHP application and you can spend about 6 hours a day, asuming that you know already how to work with your database engine and your http server, perhaps, it would take you about a week or 2, maximum a month if this is the first time you face a C-like programming language.

If this is your first time programming, then you have a lot of work to do. You need to get information on how information goes over the Internet, what a HTTP server does, how to deal with your database, and of course to learn the syntax and rules of PHP. Add some moe time to exercise what you know about programming.

A good way to start is to get the Teach yourself XXX in 24 hours or 21 days series, for any of the topics. These will give you a fair introduction to every subject, enough to make some experiments and get experience to go deeper if needed.

You can also llok for a combined tutorial, there is this good tutorial PHP-MySQL-Apache, where you are taken step by step to build a simple Web application.

http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql

Also, to learn PHP I used and continue using the official documentation from PHP's website. It is very advisable to have at hand at anytime, this will save you a lot of time.

Take care

Answer 2

I can get the language fundamentals of any language down about 10 minutes, but the libraries are hard to master, especially since PHP libraries are not OO, it'll take entire afternoon to get enough libraries nailed to write a site confident enough to write it.