I want to learn PHP and CSS from scratch

[episodic]

Any coding skills I might have once had are gone. What is the single best resource for learning these two things from scratch - inside and out. Don't want to waste my time.

Thanks!

 

[DaveSimmons]

No idea, I just try to treat PHP as C++ and google the bits that don't match

Here's a free server stack:

XAMPP - https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html

 

[Ken g6]

Well, those are two very different things. CSS is styles, not a real programming language. It's also rapidly evolving. I learned by restyling sites with Stylish, especially this one. To work with CSS, you need at least the basics of HTML, and its associated DOM. JavaScript would be nice, but you can frequently get by without it.

PHP is a real programming language. It's fairly old and stable. If you like learning from books (I don't) there's probably an O'Reilly book for you. I don't know which one, though.

And then there's all the other stuff in the LAMP ecosystem.

• Linux is frequently useful to know, but not essential.
• Apache is frequently the system that runs your PHP pages, but unless you want to be a sysadmin you can probably set it and forget it.
• MySQL...do you speak it? Or any other variant of Structured Query Language? It's not absolutely necessary to use a database with PHP, but it's strongly encouraged. I've used flat files sometimes, but that doesn't scale at all.

 

[DaveSimmons]

> I've used flat files sometimes, but that doesn't scale at all.

Not only does it not scale for one server, but it means you can't use multiple cloud servers (Amazon, Azure, etc.) since each will have its own separate local storage. It's best to use a database from the beginning instead of re-writing things later.

Also with flat files you have to come up with some locking and retry scheme for file updates since multiple web requests could be trying to update it at the same time. A real database helps with that.

 

[Childs]

Udemy has some free courses on both:

PHP
CSS

Maybe pick one with the most positive reviews, then it should get you to the point where you can target areas of interest.

 

[MrDudeMan]

> I've used flat files sometimes, but that doesn't scale at all.

Not only does it not scale for one server, but it means you can't use multiple cloud servers (Amazon, Azure, etc.) since each will have its own separate local storage. It's best to use a database from the beginning instead of re-writing things later.

Also with flat files you have to come up with some locking and retry scheme for file updates since multiple web requests could be trying to update it at the same time. A real database helps with that.

These are great points in general and I'll admit databases are usually always my first choice, but flat files have their uses. I rarely use them because databases are so awesome and, even if you don't need a full fledged server, you can still use something like SQLite.

One advantage of flat files is they are human readable and they can be easily edited manually if necessary. Using a structured format, e.g. XML, significantly simplifies parsing and makes manual interaction a breeze.

How big is the data and what is the data type? Anything can be put in a database, but I find that media sometimes makes more sense as a discrete file. It all depends.

 

[Ken g6]

Hey, look, my favorite CSS blog, CSS Tricks, just published Beginner Concepts: How CSS Selectors Work.

 

[Leros]

PHP is not the best choice these days. Do you need to learn PHP or would any serverside language work for you?

 

[TridenT]

http://yourhtmlsource.com/

 

[uclabachelor]

PHP is not the best choice these days. Do you need to learn PHP or would any serverside language work for you?

Care to explain why PHP is not the best choice?

 

[Aldon]

It's fine to prefer Ruby, Servlets or some kind framework over PHP, although there is no dispute over the most popular server-side language, which is PHP. In addition there are thousands of communities backing PHP.