Chris Roane has a new post to his blog asking an interesting question - should PHP programmers/developers spend the time to go to college?

A common debate in our field is whether or not a college education is worth it when becoming a PHP programmer. People will throw statistics in how much more money you can make with a college degree. But is the cost of college (time + tuition) for a four year degree better than the benefits of having four years of experience in the web programming field?

He qualifies it with the fact that not all college educations are created equal and that it depends on the student as to what they get out of it. He breaks it up into a few different sections with reasoning in each:

• The Benefits of Going to College
• The Cost of Going to College
• The Benefits of a PHP Programmer Not Going to College
• The Negative Aspects of a PHP Programmer Skipping College

For anyone in the Dallas, Texas area that might want to learn the ins and outs of using PHP5 as a part of a LAMP setup, this new post on the Dallas PHP User Group's site might be of interest.

I had a lot of trouble finding a PHP class so I thought others could benefit from this post.

Northlake College in Irving/Dallas offers a LAMP series including Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It is available for both credit and continuing education. They are 8 week courses usually taught in the evening 2 nights a week for $189 per class.

PHP5 and Apache start on 3/21/06

You can get the LAMP class specific schedule on their site as well...