What is a good learning path for learning php?

I would say I am past beginner stage and I simply cannot find a good tool, book, resource for learning php at a level somewhere between beginner and advanced. I have experience in html, css, javascript, basic, perl and know all at a cursory level. I do not want a 500 page book to read. Just down and dirty steps to creating mysql db driven web apps. Any help?

What is a good learning path for learning php?
Most books are good beginners. Others are good for reference. I would never buy a beginner book on anything. Advanced or reference manuals are the only books to buy for a self-learner like us!





The best way a self-learner can figure out the basics to programming is through reading source code of functioning applications. A great way is to download an open source content management system, such as Joomla!, install it and play with the source code. The "include" folder has tons of cool tricks in it. Joomla! is fairly advanced, so you might want to start with something like phpBB for basic database connection and query. However, Jooma! has tons and tons of extentions, and will show you the WORLD!





Good luck. http://www.joomla.org
Reply:http://w3schools.com I learned PHP and MySQL on there, but it's more of a begginer place. You can also find tutorials on the PHP and MySQL home pages.
Reply:Check out larry ullman's PHP %26amp; MYSQL for the world wide web and his ADVANCED PHP for the world wide web (and if youw ant his php for the world wide web too). You can get them all off of amazon on the cheap, and they are the best php books I've read (which I'm a web developer using both php and jsp so I have experience to talk about). He has a good forum on his site, http://www.dmcinsights.com/ which he answers questions you ask, whether its about the text or not (not many other authors do this). His book is written with alot of pratical examples and is not wordy (unlike the terrible learn this or that in 24 hours 7 days books which should all be burned).
Reply:There are lots of good PHP tutorials on the iNet. Try this one,





http://www.tutorialguide.net/programming...
Reply:Buy SAMS Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL, and Apache in 24 hours; I bought it, and it starts from basics and moves up.
Reply:I just recently had to develop an array of php pages for the company I work with. O'Reilly has good books and Coffecup or Adobe Dreamweaver should prove effective when writing up your php code. Good luck!