Why did you learn PHP? How has it served you?

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zimok

zimok

Click, Whirr.
Oct 27, 2008
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It's constantly mentioned that people should learn PHP but no one really writes about how it benefited them personally. What can't be done in the category of PPC / Domains / Website building that couldn't be accomplished entirely with pre-built templates/scripts etc...?

What I'm hoping from this thread is your own experience of how knowing PHP served you; when nothing pre-created/googleable could of. Any book recommendations greatly appreciated.
 


I'm new to php, but what its done for me so far is enable me to envision and implement the things I want to do without searching for scripts/coders and the like.
 
Because it's a server side language, and inevitably you will need coding done. If you want to trust the coder blindly, go right ahead.

I, for one, like the control that knowing the language brings. However, if you don't feel like you need it, and your business ventures aren't hampered in any way, by all means don't waste time learning it. To each his own.

But there is a lot that you can do with PHP, from websites to executing scripts - I'd say learn it because that's just one more weapon in your arsenal.
 
zimok said:
What I'm hoping from this thread is your own experience of how knowing PHP served you; when nothing pre-created/googleable could of. Any book recommendations greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

Hands down ... scraping

You can't ask google and expect to get a database or keyword set for the entire amazon, ebay, shopping.com, ........ websites

You also can't get a fresh list of keywords from yahoo buzz, Gg trends, ....... without doing a ton of manual work.

HTML is for children, viva la php
 
I learned PHP because I have been coding since I was in my last year of elementary school, haha old school BASIC. As I made the transition from working on Windows applications to affiliate/online marketing it only made sense that I should learn some server side scriptig language so I can create dynamic webpages, scrapers / automated systems, etc... PHP is a breeze compared to some other languages. I also looked at using RoR (Ruby on Rails) and might still.

It's pretty simple, pre-made templates and scripts only take you so far. You'll never create something new. You'll pay someone to code up something different. You'll never really understand what's going on.

So if your on some sort of fence about whether or not to learn some sort of server side scripting language, just go for it. PHP is great because there is just so much stuff made with it. So if your going to get a script chances are its in PHP, and that would be it's huge advantage - that it's so popular.
 
I learned PHP because I needed functionality in a website that wasn't available. At the time, there was a small CMS called Mambo and I used it as my base. (this was like 6 years ago) Then I started hacking away at code and ready books on PHP, in order to make it do what I wanted. Eventually, others started wanting my code and I was contributing to the Mambo source. It was very rewarding, and fun.

Since then, knowing PHP has helped my in many online ventures and my only regret is not learning sooner.

Take the advice...learn it, even if it is just the basics. That way you will know what is "do-able"...which will help you even if you pay someone else to code for you. For me, the biggest plus is knowing that I can usually find some open-source code that will get me CLOSE to what I want, and tweak it into doing EXACTLY what I want.

You will soon be finding ways to become much more productive in your online projects.
 
I think a lot of you guys are assuming I don't want to learn it, it's not the case. I posted this so me or whoever else could get some real world examples of why they should undertake the task in the first place.

Still looking for books that you guys found useful when starting out. I can google like anyone else but I still enjoy sitting down with a structured book with the upside of my eyes not starring a monitor for a part of a day.. hehe

Thanks for the replies so far!~
 
I never really "learned" it. I hack my way around and eventually get it to do what I want.
My code would probably make a real programmer cry.
 
Just a rudimentary grasp of php's readfile and header functions let you do a hell of a lot of good things that are difficult or impossible to do with plain ol html or javascript.
 
Because we work on the internet? What a silly question

If your looking for books, there are plenty torrents floating around
 
this_guy said:
How has it served you? -- haha he made a funny
Click to expand...

Well considering , I sit before you, typing this into a page called newreply.php. :D


I learned PHP/MySQL back in around 2002 because one of the companies I codeded for ware moving to a *nix server. And at the time I was only familiar with ASP/M$ Sql, and desktop programming languages. So I pretty much hit the php.net documentation and learned what i needed to know within a month (If you already have experience in one server sided scripting language like ASP, and already know similar syntax/style such as say C++, the migration to PHP isn't quite as hard).

Since then I been pretty much coding with PHP/MySQL as well as xHTML/Javascript/CSS, it helps that over 98% of webservers come pre-equipped to handle PHP, and that the technology itself is free. It's also easily cross-platform compatible, as such running a PHP/MySQL webserver locally on my macbook is quite handy for test development, where as coding for ASP I'd either have to use a desktop server with windows on it, or work within VmWare fusion, and IIS is pretty bloated as it.

And to say HTML is for children... PHP is rather bland without some kind of markup. A proficient coder knows how to use all the tools at their disposal.
 
abhorrent said:
I never really "learned" it. I hack my way around and eventually get it to do what I want.
My code would probably make a real programmer cry.
Click to expand...

Hehe. I code the same way and have a University minor in CS and have worked in IT for a few years now. (i.e. I make money writing programs)

Found a quote some way back about "being a real programmer". It basically said:
If you write programs that do stuff and run - You are a programmer. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.

Ha!

::emp::
 
zimok said:
I think a lot of you guys are assuming I don't want to learn it, it's not the case. I posted this so me or whoever else could get some real world examples of why they should undertake the task in the first place.

Still looking for books that you guys found useful when starting out. I can google like anyone else but I still enjoy sitting down with a structured book with the upside of my eyes not starring a monitor for a part of a day.. hehe

Thanks for the replies so far!~
Click to expand...

I started with some visual tutorials. But what really helped me learn it was looking at a complex website script and heavily modifying it to make it do what I wanted. You really have to do to do that to learn, but with that approach you have to have some programming background or you'll be so lost.

Start small, and build up. Yes it'll take a bit, especially if your not a programmer, but eventually it'll all make sense.
 
I started out as a developer that got into Affiliate Marketing... As others have mentioned, knowing PHP unlocks so many things like scraping/aggregating data, creating custom tracking setups, creating damn near anything under the sun you could need...

Also, some good PHP tutorials can be found here.. PHP Tutorial - Introduction
 
where would we be without php... can you imagine doing all these small scripts, utilities and plugins in java? hell no
 
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