Photo By CalEvans

During the last few weeks I decided to learn some PHP since I’ve had some requests to work with joomla.  For those that don’t know joomla is a opensource CMS built on PHP.  Also PHP seems to be a big deal now a days, most of the jobs on freelance sites require you to know PHP and it doesn’t hurt to know a bit about another technology.  So first thing I did was setup my dev environment.  I downloaded XAMPP which is an all in one Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl.  Next since I’m a fan of eclipse I downloaded the eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools Project).  After that I found this very helpful article of how to configure the eclipse PDT and XAMPP as to have a working development environment on my PC.  After having the development environment setup I searched for some PHP tutorials to go through and found w3schools.com had a very simple walkthrough of examples for PHP (PHP Tutorial).  In the end I got a very good feel of what can be done with PHP and I feel comfortable digging into some more advanced code.