PHP is a very vast language. It’s hard to say that you’ve mastered it. For example, do you know how to crop an image using GD and process web requests with XML-RPC off the top of your head? You may know one of them, but probably not both. That being said, there are a lot of resources out there that help you learn the basics of PHP – Processing forms, security, database interactions and array manipulation. I’ve compiled a list of 5 websites that I think will help you learn the ‘basics’ of PHP as well as taking them a step further.

KillerPHP.com’s Video Tutorials
I used these when I was initially learning PHP and are still a great resource today. These screencasts are typically 10 minutes long and cover the absolute basics – getting your development enviroment up and running to variables and includes.

• Local server setup
• Variables
• Arrays
• Includes
• Loops
• Form Processing
• Functions
• Sessions
• OOP

Pixel2Life’s Tutorial Index
Pixel2Life is a tutorial index where bloggers can submit their tutorials and articles. The result of hundreds of people doing this is a very large library of ‘specialised’ links. For example, at the time of writing this, the frontpage contains tutorials about Twitter, Code Igniter, Gravatars and Converting Excel to CSV with PHP. There are also numerous tutorials and articles on PHP frameworks (Code Igniter, CakePHP etc) that aren’t on the framework’s website. Be aware that there are excellent tutorials back 6 or 7 pages, so have a dig around for them.

NetTut’s PHP Tutorials
Nettuts is well known for it’s high quality tutorials. They have recently done a 3 part series on making your own PHP framework – something you don’t see on an everyday blog. Although there aren’t many PHP tutorials now, new authors are writing more tutorials on them. Often the tutorials are not only PHP, a recent one showed how to make a twitter clone in PHP which used mootools for the AJAX and effects. Lately the editor, Jeff Way, has been doing some screencasts.

PHP.net Quickref
Sorry, I had to put it in. If you don’t know what a certain function does, do a quick search on the quickref page and find it in seconds. The documentation provided by PHP isn’t the only good part, read peoples comments on real application usage of function. For example the sleep function (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.sleep.php) , it not only shows usage of it, but mini hacks people have used to get it working better, or an alternative way to do it.

PHP Builder
PHP Builder is a portal for everything PHP. It has PHP job lisitings, original articles, a snippet library, forum and a mailing list. Some of the articles on there are really interesting, using PHP as a shell language (http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/darrell20000319.php3?page=1) not only covers the basic ‘hello world’ tutorial, but using arguments and reading input from the console. The forum (http://phpbuilder.com/board/) is incredibly useful. There are fully certified Zend Engineers that help you think up