Learning Resources for PHP Devs Starting Out

I’ve been collecting a list of resources to recommend to any new developers starting out - which I found useful along the way (and still often refer back to). I thought I’d move this list to a blog post so others can use (and maybe recommend some others?). I often work in PHP, so the posts maybe very heavily tailored/biased.

Back-end (PHP + SQL)#

• PHP: The Right Way - an up-to-date guide on how to use the language with enough specific detail to keep it interesting (has the advantage of using just PHP and not being framework specific).

• Null Pointer References: The Billion Dollar Mistake - not massively important, but it’s a good lesson in using (and not always over using null), mainly interesting as a story though.

• A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins - Coding Horror - Getting started with SQL can be tricky, but this is one of the first two questions I often hear, “how do joins work?” (the other being what order do I put my statement in).

• The Twelve-Factor App - More infrastructure than code, but this guide is a great example of why PaaS work how they do, and similarly how you should think when deploying to somewhere like AWS or Azure.

• PSR Coding Standards PSR1 + PSR12 - Code style has to be one of the first things to learn when starting a language. I’m a big believer in coding to the style the project your working on has defined - which happens to be PSR most of the time.

• The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes - If anyone asks, “What’s Kubernetes?” then I’ll show them this, because I think it’s great.

• Distributed systems theory for the distributed systems engineer - Admittedly, not the basics, but a good starting point when looking at distributed systems and some of the issues they pose.

Front-end (JS)#

• How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript - a lesson in package management and how dependencies can matter.

• VueJS Lifecycle Diagram - if you’re getting started with Vue, I find it useful knowing the order things are called.

• CSS Grid Garden - a ‘game’ to get you started with the CSS Grid layout.

Can you think of any more?