I am still working on the starting stages of PHP, with real life and other obligations interfering frequently, so progress has been a tad slow. However, I have been spending a lot of time on different websites and forums learning, and getting motivated. In this post I will share some of these useful links and resources, and will be adding them as I go, so keep an eye on the Useful Links and Resources category. The ordering of these links is pretty random and does not reflect any kind of ranking.

So here goes:

• PHP Official website - This is the home of PHP, and your best source for information on bugs, updates, and PHP documentation. There is also an extensive faq, mailing lists, and a page of useful links. Definitely your best first stop for all things PHP.

• Digital Point Forums - Webmaster forums with a section for PHP. This is an excellent site to join and ask questions about any coding problems, and to learn about web design and webmaster issues in general. Excellent responses from members.

• Sitepoint Forums - Another excellent webmaster forum and great resource for anyone venturing into PHP. Very helpful place.

• HypertextFever Forums - This is a new forum that’s really cool and shows great promise for being a great resource. It has a lot more of a personal feel to it. While the bigger more established forums are awesome, sometimes when you’re a novice you need a smaller setting so that you don’t feel too intimidated… I know I do. Great quality responses, and the owner of the forum is a PHP/MySQL guru, and responds fast and extensively to all questions, so this is a great place for anyone who wants to learn and grow.

• Joe Watkins - PHP Programmer - This website is a bit more advanced but has useful PHP scripts and interesting tips and code. You can register and subscribe to the feed to get the latest posts.

There are numerous more and I will be adding them as I go, after I evaluate them. I may eventually build a link page to list them all. If you know any exceptional ones that should absolutely not be left out please feel free to leave a comment and I will add them to my growing list!

For now… happy coding!

In my last post I talked about dealing with a .sql file from the command line. This worked well, but there are other ways to interact with your databases that are GUI based, and perhaps easier for someone accustomed to dealing with the GUI interface. The two that I am currently playing with are PHPMyAdmin and Heidi SQL. Both are free to download and use, keeping with my theme of using free tools and utilities whenever I possibly can.

I have worked with phpMyAdmin before on the web but now have it installed on my laptop along with the Apache Server, MySQL and PHP. I have never used Heidi SQL before so it will be interesting to see what these tools have to offer in terms of working with and manipulating databases.

As I wrote in response to Bo’s comment to my tutorial on working with .sql dump files, phpMyAdmin has been known to fail when importing larger databases, and this is where the command line comes in handy. For some, working from the command line is just preferable to using a GUI. However, not all hosts allow you to have shell access to your account, so it’s a good thing to get accustomed to using both the command line and GUI tools.

One thing about installing phpMyAdmin with PHP5 is that it’s a bit of a chore getting it to talk to MySQL. As I discovered after a lot of head banging, googling, pounding my keyboard, and a swearing, this is primarily a PHP installation problem.

Since v.5 onwards, PHP does not come inbuilt with support for MySQL as a default anymore, therefore if you have trouble connecting to MySQL from phpMyAdmin at your initial installation, chances are that the problem lies in the fact that your PHP is not talking to MySQL. There’s a lot of information in different forums about this, and google is your best friend.

My solution was to delete my manual installation of PHP, and install PHP5 using the msi installer from php.net with its default settings. If you enable all the extensions you will have trouble since some of them require other software to be installed. Your best bet is to install it as it is (selecting your version of the server of course), and then add extensions. You do this by going to “Add/Remove Programs” in Control Panel, choose Change the installation, and enable MySQL, MySQLi, Mcrypt, and Multi-Byte String to run from the hard drive. This step ensures that you don’t need to edit your php.ini file as suggested in many forums, and which you would need to do if you were installing manually. You should also add the extension folder (usually C:/Program Files/PHP/ext) to the PATH. While you are there double check that your installation folder (C:/Program Files/PHP/) is also in the path. Remember that each time you make a change to your PHP install you need to restart your server (Apache in my case) to load the new configuration. And whenever you make changes to your PATH variables, ideally you need to restart your computer for the changes to take effect.

You can test if your PHP install is talking to MySQL by creating and running a PHP file such as the one below, provided kindly to me by Bo.

(You will need to insert your own values for “mysql_username”, “mysql_password” and “mysql_db_name”).

If your install was successful, you should see something like

After PHP is installed correctly and works with MySQL, you can then install (or run) phpMyAdmin following the instructions given on the web page.

Now that I have finally successfully installed phpMyAdmin, I have all the tools that I need to start doing some serious stuff, and I am going to start writing some code in PHP and also interacting with databases using the three tools that I have at my disposal - phpMyAdmin, Heidi SQL, and the good old command line.

So now I have my laptop all set up so that I can write and test php code. My next step was to collect the remaining tools I need to start, so first I had to decide what I’m going to use to write and edit my code. I’ve always liked Notepad for HTML coding because it doesn’t leave behind any codes or stuff. It’s just a plain clean text editor. But the disadvantage with Notepad is that a lot of debuggers will report errors by line number. Notepad doesn’t insert line numbers, and the last thing I want to do is start counting lines of code. So I caved in and decided to find a better editor that’s more suited for programming.

Several options were suggested to me, but I decided to go with two of them for now, because I have commitment issues and like to have options :). My choices are Notepad++ and PHP Designer 2007 Personal, both free. I also have Programmers Notepad that I’ve used before for other stuff, I might try it for PHP too - alternatives are a good thing.

Finally, before getting down and dirty, I need some kind of goal, a project. I learn best when I have something that I am building, so I picked a book that approaches the learning process by creating something. The book is Beginning PHP5, Apache, and MySQL Web Development (Programmer to Programmer), and I’m going to start with that and see if it works for me. I do have some of my own projects in mind, but they’re still wisps of ideas, so I’m going to borrow the author’s projects for now. There are other excellent books out there, but this is one that I grabbed off the shelf at the Free Library.

The first step for me in the PHP journey was to set up a server on my laptop so that I could code and test my code locally, without uploading it to my hosting account. After some research, I decided to install Apache, PHP, and MySQL from scratch without using any of the installation packages. It was a long and interesting process, took me about 3 hours, but was very rewarding.

It actually wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. First I downloaded and installed Apache HTTP Server 2.2.4, configured and tested it. I had some port troubles with getting the server to start but it finally worked. I then installed PHP 5.2.3, configured it, tested it and made sure it worked well with Apache, and then finally I installed MySQL Server 5.0 (Community Server, which is the free one), and tested it, and that works too.

The hardest part was getting MySQL 5 to work, with configuring and root access and passwords, but now everything is working smoothly on my laptop and I can write and test php code.

There are other ways to install the triad. If you don’t want to go through the trouble of installing and configuring everything by hand, you can use the installation packages that are available. Some of the more common ones that were recommended to me are: WAMP, XAMPP, PHPTRIAD, and LAMP (for Linux). I can’t really recommend one over another since I did the installation piece by piece, but feel free to test them and write a review here about your experience.

If you do decide to install everything from scratch like I did, there are many resources to help you out. The websites for each individual package are really handy and will help you. The installation itself is also pretty intuitive, but occasionally you need to move files around and edit some config files to make everything work. I will be posting a tutorial soon on the installation process so keep checking.

I finally decided to start learning PHP/mySQL in a serious fashion. I am going to be posting my learning process in this blog under the PHP Journey category. I will be adding the new skills that I learned and any tips and tricks that I have found. I will also be adding links to useful resources and tools that I am using, so if you’re a newbie like me or a seasoned PHP coder, journey along with me as I delve into this. When I learn something useful that might be a help to someone who is learning also, I will post it here, so stay tuned!