The Joy of Programming PHP

PHP is a great programming language. It's free, powerful, relatively easy to setup and learn, and it has extensions and frameworks available to do almost anything you could imagine.  Frankly, it's just plain fun too.

But if you've never programmed before or have programmed before but not with PHP and want to learn it, wouldn't it be great to find a tutorial that  conveyed the sheer joy of it?  That's what I want to do!

There are tons of resources out there for learning PHP, but none of them are especially practical and most are boring rather than fun.  They go over each specific command one by one, never tying it together, and spending (IMHO) too much time going over every possible variation of each command, with optional parameters that you probably won't need if you're just starting out.

I want to write an e-book with a companion website that gives a concise introduction to everything you might actually want to do with PHP, but with fun as one of the goals.  I want to inspire a new generation of programmers. 

We'll start with an overview of the basics, then dive into a hands-on exercise right away to give an early sense of accomplishment.

Some of the topics I'm planning to cover:

• How to install PHP on your own computer
• How to use PHP on a basic web page, and how to find an editor that works for you
• How to organize your PHP projects
• How to use PHP with a database, such as mySQL
• How to create forms to Add, Edit, and Delete data
• How to use PHP to read and write to files
• Making your applications sizzle by using jQuery or DOJO
• Introduction to frameworks such as CakePHP and whether to use them or not

This is more than just an e-book; it will be a full course that will include sample exercises (along with the answers) to make sure that you can implement the concepts in a practical way on your own.   I'll include plenty of samples you can copy and paste into your own code.  The book will stand on it's own, but I'll also have a place where code can be downloaded and the samples can be run already done for you.