We live in a very exciting time. Never before has education been so cheaply available to the masses (if not free). The medium, itself, has made tectonic shifts from a classroom setting, to blogs, screencasts and complete university classes, as a set of videos and interactive forums. Given these resources, there's absolutely no excuse not to dive in and learn. However, with such a wealth of resources, filtering through the options can often become overwhelming. In this article, I will outline a simple process to kick-start your education.

Among the items in their list there's things like:

• "Let the Information Flow Begin"
• "Listen and Watch"
• "Blogging"
• "Feel the Pulse"
• "Meetups and Conferences"

Each tip comes with a bit of description and some links to other resources and tools that can help you along your way.

Last summer I started learning a little bit of PHP, knowing HTML and CSS drove me towards wanting to learn some PHP for fun. I went through a pretty simple book, and made some simple websites (registration and message system, user submitted data, file uploads) using mostly tutorials which I tweaked a little bit. Since last summer I haven't learned anything new, but now that summer is coming along again I might be a bit bored, so I have been thinking of attempting to learn even more.

Suggestions included in the comments are things like:

• Learn about software architecture.
• Understand your environment.
• I very highly suggest learning a PHP framework.
• http://www.phptherightway.com
• Start learning industry tools for PHP. It will all influence your coding style, and illustrate why some styles are considered best practices.
• To add to the other suggestions, I recommend becoming a regular contributor to one or more open source projects.
• What helped me a lot was to write my own micro framework using OOP that I can now use for future websites and web applications.
• Come up with a 'complex' web site/application idea and get to it. Bonus points if you can launch it and make money off it (half kidding).

You can read the full set of comments for more good suggestions here.

I know PHP. I mean, I really know PHP. Not just the syntax, or the idioms and idiosyncrasies, but why. I can tell you why something works the way it does, under the hood; and I was probably around when the decision was made to do it that way. Thirteen years with any language is a long time. [...] Ultimately, it comes down to: Is it the right tool for the task? Because of this, ultimately when I come to write a web site, PHP is my tool of choice. Know thy tool well, and it shall treat you well. Then along came Engine Yard, and I was exposed to just a ton of fantastic engineers who happen to choose Ruby as their tool of choice.

His project was the site for the Distill conference Engine Yard is putting on in August. He lists a few "WTF" moments he came across when learning and creating the site with Ruby including issues with parentheses on metod calls, method naming rules, implicit returns and variations on control structures. He also talks about some of the other technologies used to power the site like OAuth and S3 for image uploads (via paperclip). He finishes out the post by wrapping up the experience and talking some about the benefits of getting outside your comfort zone and learning something wildly new (language or other technology) to give you perspective.

We are welcoming some new colleagues that come from a Java background in the Onebip team, both from the development and operations field. Here's a primer on learning PHP in this situation, that you may find useful when introducing similar people in your PHP-based projects.

He breaks it up into a few sections:

• the "absolute basics" (like the differences in variable handling)
• things to not care about (like procedural PHP or the installation of Apache+PHP)
• how to "write to a graph" (things like PDO, DateTime)
• things to watch out for (like == vs === and some php.ini settings)

He also recommends doing some coding katas with TDD to give you a "crash course" in the language and help you learn from more than just reading.

When applying for PHP jobs would it be more advantageous to have made your own software without the use of a framework? I'm starting a portfolio of projects and I'm unsure whether to stick to one framework and learn it well, use a variety of them, or also try building software from scratch. Which would look better to a prospective employer? or does it not matter too much? (considering I'm talking junior roles)

Recommendations from the comments including things like:

• "Making your own software is always a better qualification. Because doing your own frameworks means that you understood the general concept of frameworks. But it doesn't hurt to be familiar with the big ones"
• "It doesn't matter. Show that you know how to write good quality code."
• "Frameworks change, the language doesn't. With a good understanding of the language itself, you should be able to pick up any framework fairly quickly."
• "I think you need to know enough of the underlying language to understand what the framework is doing for you. Typically that comes from folks rolling their own framework for awhile"

Read the rest of the comments (or make your own contribution) on the full post.

Are you yet to learn your first programming language? Why is it that you're putting it off? If you think it's going to be too hard, like learning a real, spoken language - you are wrong. In fact, you've fallen victim to what I like to call The Big Programming Language Fallacy - the mistaken belief that programming languages are analogous to real languages.

They go through each of their myths and explain what's wrong about them, each building on the previous ones in the list:

• Myth 1: Programming Languages are the 'Languages of Computers'
• Myth 2: Programming Languages are Foreign and Hard to Read
• Myth 3: Programming Languages Take Years to Learn

They point out that, in the case of most programming languages these days, they've been designed to be "readable" and something that can relate to basic terms (a subset of a completely new language).

So here is the challenge. Starting Wednesday 26th Dec and for the following 12 days I'm going to do just one kata per day. I'm calling it the 12 TDDs of Christmas and it would be pretty cool if a few other people out there took up the challenge with me 0 fancy it?

The 12 days started on December 26th, so there's a little catch up work to do, but you're not too far behind. The "katas" are short problems to solve that only require a bit of code to get working. The idea, though, is that you practice with the test-first methods and use these examples as the assertions.

The original question from was a 16 year old who's been doing some basic CRUD apps, but is getting bored and wanted to move on to 'real' development. There were some good replies, but few went in to the depth of detail that I think beginners are even aware of. Granted, this might scare off some, but for others it might give them some ideas about what's possible and what's involved in professional web development. I know I'm going to leave off some topics, so feel free to add on!

He touches on topics ranging from version control to performance and even a mention of mobile development. Each section includes a brief summary of the topic and some have specific topics to check out to help narrow things down to the important parts.

I started 12 years ago designing websites. back then the fun and the complexity were playing with css, javascript and dhtml. [...] So right now i need some advice because im kind of lost facing so many possibilities. I want to learn the MVC approach, but i think that doing it by learning a different language (like ruby) will help me to increase my knowledge and being able to work with CI, Cake, Zend or Symphony more naturally. What should i focus first? web design tools? frameworks? mobile programming? NoSql databases?

Responses so far talk about things like using version control, even just in personal projects, the usefulness of Ajax/modern Javascript, more advanced CSS techniques, SOA and some framework suggestions to fill the MVC desire.

Do you have a recommendation on what'd be a "next good thing" to learn in the current web development world? Share it here!

I've had a lot of experience using OO PHP but have so far written my own code. I'd like to dive in and finally learn to use a decent modern MVC framework (something I've been putting off for a while due to the time needed to get past the learning curve). From what I've seen the leading contenders are FuelPHP and Kohana, but I really don't know how to judge one over another.

Of course, there's suggestions for specific frameworks but there's also some comments that promote the "it depends" mentality - basic the framework choice off of what you're going to use it for. There's also a few suggestions of working on his own framework, just to learn how some of the pieces fit together.