PHP is an open-source back-end scripting language used for creating dynamic and interactive web pages and applications. It is one of the oldest and most widely-used programming languages for web development, with around 80% of all websites running on PHP, including major platforms like Facebook, WordPress, Upwork, and Spotify.

Though highly technical in nature, with a bit of online guidance and dedication, PHP skills can be acquired in no time. Many online sources can help you become fluent in PHP, whether you are a total beginner or want to advance your PHP skills. 

Online tutorials can be an excellent learning tool. Choosing the best to learn PHP can be the first step toward this profitable career. Here is our choice of top five tutorials that will help you to learn PHP more effectively and become a better PHP developer.

Before we move on to the list of the best tutorials, let’s first clarify why you should learn PHP in 2022.

Why Learn PHP?

Even though its popularity has declined over the years, PHP is still extensively used in web development. Efficient, flexible, simple, and easy to learn, you can create anything from a simple website to a complex web application with PHP. It’s free and open-source, supports most web browsers, and has many additional tools to assist it. Additionally, it has a large and active community of developers to learn and get help for your web development projects. 

And since there are still millions of sites built using PHP, PHP developers are always in demand, and there are many job opportunities available, both in freelancing and full-time jobs. 

1. Learn PHP by Codecademy

Learn PHP is a free 25-hour course that will teach you the fundamental programming concepts of PHP through interactive exercises, quizzes, articles, and freeform projects. This course covers everything from PHP variables and functions to PHP arrays, form validation using HTML forms, conditionals, logic, and loops, as well as more advanced lessons like classes and objects in PHP. It is suitable for beginners, though some basic HTML knowledge will be helpful before taking the course. Taking Learn PHP is an excellent opportunity for those who prefer getting directly into the code because it teaches you by actively doing coding exercises rather than just video or text tutorials. 

2. PHP for Beginners – Become a PHP Master – CMS Project by Udemy

PHP for Beginners is a great course that will take you from scratch to PHP mastery and teach you real-world PHP skills. With over 70,000 enrolled students, this is one of the most popular beginner-level PHP courses on Udemy. It’s also one of the most comprehensive PHP courses on the platform, with 38 hours of video lectures that teach you almost everything you need to know about PHP. 

PHP for Beginners is taught by an experienced engineer and mainly focuses on practical lessons instead of theory and covers various topics such as code editors and PHP basics, PHP data types, control structures, and functions. You will also learn how to create a Content Management System (CMS) and use MySQL and Object-Oriented Programming. 

Note that this course puts a lot of emphasis on using PHP in the context of CMS, so If you don’t intend to use CMS in your work, maybe this is not the right course for you. Otherwise, this is a perfect course to start learning PHP in 2022. 

3. Building Web Applications in PHP by Coursera

This PHP course by the University of Michigan on Coursera is aimed at intermediate-level students with some previous knowledge of PHP. It is instructed by Dr. Charles R. Severance, a Clinical Professor, and has very positive reviews and ratings. You can freely examine the course content, but to get full access, you need to subscribe. 

It is an excellent course for those who are interested not only in PHP but in web development as a whole. In addition to PHP, it teaches basic lessons in HTML and CSS. You will also learn the basic structure of a web app, request and response cycles, PHP syntax and data structures, and how a web browser interacts with a web server. The course also covers PHP arrays, functions, error handling, and superglobal variables. 

This course is a good mix of theoretical and practical assignments, and you’ll get weekly practical assignments.

4. Laravel PHP Framework Tutorial by FreeCodeCamp

Laravel is an open-source, back-end PHP-based framework for creating simple to complex web applications. It is free and easy to use and is one of the most popular PHP frameworks nowadays, used by thousands of developers.

Laravel PHP Framework Tutorial is a great tutorial for beginners who want to develop both PHP and Laravel skills. It was created by freeCodeCamp.org, a nonprofit organization helping people learn to code for free, and is instructed by Victor Gonzalez. You can find it on YouTube. 

During the 4.5 hours-long video tutorial, you will have an intro about Laravel and lessons on getting started with PHP coding. Then you will move on to an in-depth explanation of how to build an Instagram clone from scratch with all its built-in functionalities. The best thing about this tutorial is that you learn from a real-world project.  

Keep in mind that this tutorial can have some outdated info because it is based on Laravel 5.8. But you can quickly fix this if you go to the comment section, get help from the community members, and use Laravel 8.0 while completing the course. 

5. Object-Oriented PHP Learning by Eduonix

Eduonix Learning Solutions is an online learning and training platform and a Udemy instructor. Among many other topics, it offers online web development courses, one of which is Object-Oriented PHP Learning. This course is aimed at intermediate students with some basic knowledge of PHP. It is a great choice to get the fundamentals of both PHP and object-oriented programming and learn to build a website using both. 

Although relatively short, only 4.5 hours, this course includes understanding the concepts behind object-oriented PHP, building a complete website using classes and objects in PHP, learning about abstraction and Inheritance, and learning how to deal with RDBMS within the OOPS framework.

After finishing the course, you will get a certification of completion and free full lifetime access to all the course resources.

Summary

These tutorials offer a good starting point if you are new to the PHP world. If you are an intermediate-level PHP developer, you can use these tutorials to develop your skills further and stay ahead of the rest. 

Many great PHP courses and tutorials are available for coders of all experience levels, so choose those that best suit your needs and learning style. Just remember, learning doesn’t stop once you finish the tutorial. The best way to learn PHP is to use your skills and build something on your own. Web development technologies constantly evolve, and there’s always more to master. Never stop learning and exploring. 

Put your skills into practice at Cosmic Development.

If you are looking for a place to put your PHP knowledge into practice and work with the newest technology in the field, visit Cosmic Development’s career page. We offer free courses and training programs for our employees and a fun and stimulating work environment. Currently, we have a job opening for a Senior Software Engineer with 5+ years of experience with object-oriented PHP. Go ahead and apply. 

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With over eight years of experience as a software engineer and senior PHP developer, Zharko Mircheski is not only one of the best programmers in Cosmic Development, but he has been a real family member ever since he joined the company in 2013. Back then, Cosmic Development was a company of approximately 30 employees, and Zharko was perceived as a valuable team player right from the start. 

As a senior PHP developer, Zharko is primarily responsible for code writing and code reviewing, but his scope of work also includes participating in R&D meetings where the implementation of new technologies is discussed, mentoring new associates, helping other colleagues with resolving code implementation issues, etc.

His contribution to projects like MD.com, Bookmark.com, Rumble.com, SomeSpider.com is enormous and most appreciated. That’s one of the main reasons why Zharko was given a recognition award in 2018 for 5 years of outstanding work at our company.

Employee Recognition Awards Ceremony 2018

What was the biggest challenge when you started working in Cosmic Development?

Remembering the names of all new colleagues, but I guess that’s probably the initial challenge everyone gets faced with when starting a new position in an unfamiliar working environment. On a more serious note, I’d say that the biggest challenge was adopting the company culture and procedures. The social aspect is as important as the technical part of a new job.

If you were to offer a piece of advice (as a senior PHP developer) to your less-experienced colleagues, what would it be?

What I think is crucial when starting at a new company regardless of a professional level or industry is to pay attention, ask the right questions to the right people, be proactive and assure other colleagues that they can count on you.

Being a part of a highly productive team is both rewarding and demanding. How do you overcome stressful situations?

It does feel rewarding to be part of so many projects. However, it’s also challenging and sometimes even stressful, especially when you’re aware that some of these projects are actually the backbone of multi-million businesses. What I have learned over the years is that you should always strive to focus on the problem itself and don’t let the thinking of “what ifs” distract you. Every now and then, a situation occurs when I feel like I have tried every possible solution to locate and/or fix a problem but still failed to find the right one. I am sure a lot of you have had the same feeling. 

What do you do then?

When something like that happens, I usually take a short coffee break, go play a game of ping pong with some of my colleagues, or simply go out to get some fresh air. The routine break can do wonders for overcoming obstacles. A good alternative is to ask your colleagues to help you out. The second pair of eyes can spot the “stupid” mistake you can’t see.

Zharko Mircheski, Senior PHP Developer

What’s your favorite “know-how” source?

There are many of them, but I’ll start with books. Nowadays, it is very easy to go online and find what you need to fix a problem, but it is necessary to have a solid base of programming knowledge and skills if you want to be a good programmer. 

There are many excellent books on programming and software, but my favorite ones are Clean Code by Robert C Martin and Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, John Vlissides, Ralph Johnson, and Richard Helm. The first one offers insights for best practices on writing clean, understandable and testable code, while the second one is essential for understanding how the code is structured in object-oriented constructs, how to use them and how to recognize which design pattern to choose for solving a particular problem.

The other aspect is to get familiar with the stack you work on by using the documentation websites of a specific language, but sometimes even “lighter reads” can help catch up with new tech.

Zharko Mircheski in action

What would be the top 5 (or more) websites for PHP developers of your choice?

An excellent place to find almost everything when it comes to PHP is php.net. Depending on the framework, PHP developers also use Laravel.com, Symfony.com, or in case of WordPress WordPress.org. 

In terms of services, pages like developers.facebook.com (for Facebook APIs) and developers.google.com (for Google APIs)  can also be very helpful. If you need to add online payment, you would want to check developer.paypal.com or stripe.com, and for email campaigns, the place to go to is developer.mailchimp.com. It all depends on the stack and services you use. 

When you get stuck with something (a senior PHP developer does it too) – just google it, and most of the time stackoverflow.com will provide you with the solution. However, please bear in mind to avoid the copy/paste option.

I can also recommend dev.to because there’s always something new and exciting to read on that web site.

What is your greatest professional accomplishment so far?

I don’t think I can point to one specific thing as I’ve worked on many different projects and gathered valuable experience from all of them. But I can say that I’m really proud of my work for Rumble.com and Bookmark.com.

I guess the most significant accomplishment is that I have grown as a developer and as a professional, and this is an ongoing process.

Zharko Mircheski and Ryan Milnes, CEO

Can you give our readers advice on how to be more productive at work?

That depends on the working environment as much as on a developer him/herself. I found that I am most productive when I know precisely what I need to work on. So I guess it’s a good idea to define your tasks first and then try to clear the list in the timeframe you have set as your target. Preferably before the deadline.

What do you like to do for fun?

Well, I like ping pong a lot. We play it at work almost every day. We have teams and keep scores of our matches, and from time to time, we even make tournaments.

I also like to go out with my friends, watch good movies, and read books. I love to play games on my PC, but lately, I don’t have much time for that. The best fun I have these days is when I’m playing with my little daughter.

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