There is a tremendous amount of PHP reference material online. With everything from the annotated PHP manual to sites with periodic articles and tutorials, a fast Internet connection rivals a large bookshelf in PHP documentary usefulness. Here are some key sites:
- The Annotated PHP Manual: http://www.php.net/manual/
Available in seventeen languages, this includes both official documentation of functions and language features as well as user-contributed comments.
- PHP mailing lists: http://www.php.net/mailing-lists.php
There are many PHP mailing lists covering installation, programming, extending PHP, and various other topics. A read-only web interface to the mailing lists is at http://news.php.net/.
- PHP Presentation archive: http://conf.php.net/
A collection of presentations on PHP given at various conferences.
- PEAR: http://pear.php.net/
PEAR calls itself “a framework and distribution system for reuseable PHP components.” You’ll find lots of useful PHP classes and sample code there.
- PHP.net: A Tourist’s Guide: http://www.php.net/sites.php
This is a guide to the various web sites under the php.net umbrella.
- PHP Knowledge Base: http://php.faqts.com/
Many questions and answers from the PHP community, as well as links to other resources.
- PHP DevCenter: http://www.onlamp.com/php/
A collection of PHP articles and tutorials with a good mix of introductory and advanced topics.
This section lists books that are helpful references and tutorials for building applications with PHP. Most are specific to web-related programming; look for books on MySQL, HTML, XML, and HTTP.
At the end of the section, we’ve included a few books that are useful for every programmer regardless of language of choice. These works can make you a better programmer by teaching you how to think about programming as part of a larger pattern of problem solving.
Programming PHP by Kevin Tatroe and Rasmus Lerdorf (O’Reilly).
HTML and XHTML: The Definitive Guide by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy (O’Reilly).
Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Guide by Danny Goodman (O’Reilly).
Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl (O’Reilly).
XML in a Nutshell by Elliotte Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means (O’Reilly).
MySQL Reference Manual, by Michael “Monty” Widenius, David Axmark, and MySQL AB (O’Reilly); also available at http://www.mysql.com/documentation/.
MySQL, by Paul DuBois (New Riders).
Web Security, Privacy, and Commerce by Simson Garfinkel and Gene Spafford (O’Reilly).
Web Services Essentials, by Ethan Cerami (O’Reilly).
HTTP Pocket Reference, by Clinton Wong (O’Reilly).
The Practice of Programming, by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike (Addison-Wesley).
Programming Pearls by Jon Louis Bentley (Addison-Wesley).
The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks (Addison-Wesley).
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