Keep your projects in mind

Now that you know why you want to learn PHP, it is also useful to have an objective in mind for what you want to do with it. Learning PHP will be a long process, and staying motivated will be easier with an end goal in mind. Online courses, such as BitDegree's Learn PHP Online course, keep the learning process interesting and interactive by having you build a project as you learn the fundamentals of PHP development. This is a great way to make the learning process interesting and relatable, but even better is having the idea of your project in mind. If you keep your project in mind, you will have a greater incentive to remember what you learn if you want to apply it to your project. You will need to continually practice your newly developing PHP skills, PHP Training institute in Ahmedabad and it is usually easiest to motivate yourself to work on your project. You can even build different versions of your project as your skills progress. For example, you could initially create a simple contact app that has basic functionality to add and delete contacts. As your skills develop you could hook this up to a database. Later you could add more advanced functionality, before putting it live and inviting your friends to submit their details. Before you know it, you could be the owner of one of the world's largest social networking sites connecting more than a billion people and generating billions of dollars in advertising revenue. Who knows?

Tip 3 – Learn HTML first

While PHP is a fine choice as your first programming language, it shouldn't be your first step in web development. If you haven't learned it already, you should dedicate some time to learning HTML before you start to learn PHP. HTML is a markup language, rather than a programming language, that forms the basis for web pages. This means that the code you write represents the basic elements of a web page, such as images or text. You can't program any functionality with a markup language, which makes it relatively simple to learn, and has also created the need for a language like PHP to be used in addition to HTML to make websites more dynamic. As PHP is generally used to make HTML dynamic, HTML is commonly seen in PHP documents. Not only will HTML be present in most applications of PHP, but it will also be part of many tutorials and lessons on PHP development. Most of these tutorials will simply assume that you already know HTML. So rather than finding yourself learning both at once, take a few hours to learn the basics of HTML. Learning PHP will take months, but the time needed to learn HTML is a matter of hours. You could start with BitDegree's Space Doggos course, which will not only teach you HTML and CSS but will also feature our lovable Doggo!

learn HTML and CSS with Space Doggos

Tip 4 – Active learning over passive

One of the best ways to make learning more effective is to learn actively rather than passively. To learn passively means to simply watch/read/listen and absorb information. To learn actively means to use what you're learning in a problem or project. Educational professionals seem to be unanimous in their belief that active learning strategies are better than passive ones. The only problem is that creating an active learning experience is generally more difficult than creating a passive one. BitDegree's 'Learn PHP Online' course is a great example of an active learning experience. To advance past each lesson in the course, you have to solve the problem by using what you have just learned in the code editor.

Learn PHP - PHP in action

An example of passive learning experience would be watching a YouTube video of an instructor voicing over a slideshow which explains what functions are. Passive learning experiences can still be useful, though. The instructor might offer the best explanation of what a function is that you've ever heard. The advice here isn't necessarily to avoid passive learning experiences entirely but to try to make them active. You could take the examples in the lecture and write them out yourself, making alterations and seeing what happens.

Tip 5 – Don't be afraid to break things

Be careful with this advice. If you are working on a live site, purposefully breaking things is certainly not the best idea. If you are working with WordPress, it is generally advised to leave the PHP files in the WordPress core alone. Don't break those. But in offline project files you create, or in the PHP files in the WordPress theme folders, breaking things isn't a bad idea. You'll learn a lot from putting them back together. This advice doesn't strictly mean you have to break your websites, but rather that you shouldn't be afraid of it happening. Things going wrong is generally an excellent learning experience. The bigger the problem, the better you will remember the solution. For beginners, the interactive code editors in the BitDegree 'Learn PHP Online' course are a great environment in which to experiment. You can rest assured that whatever you do to the code you will be editing, you won't be able to take the whole BitDegree website down so experiment. By the way, if the course exceeds a bit your finances at the moment, you can try to apply for BitDegree micro-scholarships. A sponsor might fund your course fees and help you out with a little reward at the end! If you have a couple of ideas on how to solve a problem and the first one works, make sure you try your second idea too, rather than simply advancing. In web development, there's usually more than one way to solve a problem.