How hard is it to learn basic PHP?

[lozzie]

I am currently an admin on a vBulletin forum like this, and find that little .php after every little thing I click.

What i'm wondering is how hard is it really to learn basic PHP? What are the usages of the language that would make me want to pick up a book, read it, and learn it. Or, have someone teach it to me.

[mike]

php learning is very easy lozzie, just purchase a good book for beginning with php and search from internet where you can find a lots of free scripts of php

[pcoptimized]

Well, for starters, you can make your pages dynamic - meaning you can have content update for you without you having to manually update it. Like you mentioned, vBulletin is php driven. That's a powerful feature of using php itself. You can store data in a database with php and read it back out to your visitors.
There are many reasons to use php.
Here's a small challenge for you. Make a footer for one of your sites where you use php to update and display the copyright year on each page when a new year starts. It's a small thing, but will help you start learning. Will also give you a valuable use for php. Once you have the php footer on each page, you will no longer need to update any dates on your pages every year.

[David Super]

What is a good site to learn php on?

[pcoptimized]

Here's two places:
http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_intro.asp
http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials.php

[colin]

PHP is based on C++ language and the syntax used in PHP is quite similar to C/C++. C/C++ is still considered the best programming language by many programmers and people who love this language would surely feel more comfortable with the syntax of PHP. ASP on the other hand has a more Visual Basic kind of syntax that again is closely related to only Microsoft products. So, it depends on a person-to-person which language he or she is comfortable

[theseeric]

This is not very hard to learn just 1st step is to learn HTML(hyper text markup language) then you can easily understand what php is and then gofor basic,s

[linda]

It stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor - it's what's known as a recursive acronym where one of the initials actually stands for the whole acronym. There's another fact you never really wanted!

[rover]

PHP is dead simple. If you've ever programmed before, pick a simple online tutorial to get the drift of things - that might even be enough to get you going. Then it's just finding examples for very specific issues rather than learning "the language".