5 Best PHP Books for Beginners & Advanced Programmers

PHP has become one of the most popular scripting languages for web development. In this post, we have hand-picked 5 best PHP books for beginners & advanced programmers that will help you get started if you are a beginner and enhance your knowledge if you are an advanced user of PHP.

Before going into that list, let us first get some basic information about PHP.

PHP is a scripting language that is widely used for web development. The first version of PHP was released in the year 1994. The most popular content management system (WordPress) is created using the PHP language. PHP code is also used in popular websites such as Facebook and Digg.

The demand for PHP professionals is increasing day-by-day and PHP is one of the best programming languages which will help you get a programming job in the present job market.

Finding a great book for learning PHP could be a time-consuming task. You need not worry as we have curated the top PHP books to transform you from a complete beginner to a skilled PHP professional in a short time.

Let’s go through the 5 best PHP programming books.


Best PHP Books for Beginners & Advanced Programmers

1. PHP Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for PHP Programmers

PHP Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for PHP Programmers by David Sklar & Adam Trachtenberg
PHP Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for PHP Programmers by David Sklar & Adam Trachtenberg

PHP Cookbook is most suitable for experienced PHP programmers or people who have some sort of programming experience.

This book covers some basics concepts of PHP. You can use this book as a reference.

The topics covered in this book are strings, numbers, arrays, variables, functions, classes, and objects, etc.

In conclusion, it is an excellent PHP book for those that are experienced programmers. It is not a learning manual it is more of a reference book.

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2. Head First PHP & MySQL: A Brain-Friendly Guide

Head First PHP & MySQL: A Brain-Friendly Guide by Lynn Beighley & Michael Morrison
Head First PHP & MySQL: A Brain-Friendly Guide by Lynn Beighley & Michael Morrison

Head First PHP & MySQL is one of the best PHP books for beginners.

You will get real-world examples of how to harness the power of the popular PHP programming language and MySQL database.

This book is full of mentally challenging exercises and quizzes to enhance your absorption of programming concepts.

It covers the basic and fundamental concepts of PHP and MySQL and also goes to explain the advanced topics such as content management, database queries, session IDs, cookies, file I/O operations, and form validation, and many more.

You will learn how to use PHP to transform static HTML pages into dynamic websites, how to create and populate your own MySQL database tables, how to use cookies and sessions to track visitors, validate information on forms, protect your data from SQL injection attacks, and many more.

We highly recommend this book for learning PHP and believe this should be your first buy. You can buy this book from the links given below.

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3. PHP and MySQL Web Development

PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling & Laura Thomson
PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling & Laura Thomson

PHP and MySQL Web Development is a good book and contains tons of PHP information.

This book is full of real-world examples of applications. It has more than 1000 pages of content that make this book one of the detailed books on the subject of PHP and MySQL.

In this practical hands-on book, you will learn about storing and retrieving data, how to use arrays, string manipulation and regular expressions, reusing code, object-oriented PHP, error and exception handling, advanced PHP techniques, how to use PHP and MySQL for large projects and finally debugging.

We recommend this book to you to get a very good knowledge of PHP and MySQL.

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4. The Joy of PHP: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Interactive Web Applications with PHP and MySQL

The Joy of PHP: A Beginner's Guide to Programming Interactive Web Applications with PHP and mySQL by Alan Forbes
The Joy of PHP: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Interactive Web Applications with PHP and MySQL by Alan Forbes

The Joy of PHP by Alan Forbes is a great book for beginners. There are plenty of tips and tricks for the beginner in this book.

You will get knowledge of basic HTML at the beginning of the book and then you will get to know about PHP

The book will teach you how to install and configure PHP, basic introduction to HTML, basic PHP syntax, variables, numbers, dates, strings, control structures, how to use MySQL database, how to use PHP and MySQL together, how to create forms and many more.

Must-buy for beginners in PHP.

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5. PHP & MySQL Novice to Ninja

PHP & MySQL Novice to Ninja by Kevin Yank
PHP & MySQL Novice to Ninja by Kevin Yank

PHP & MySQL: Novice to Ninja is a well-written book on PHP and MySQL. This book is most suitable for beginners.

This book will teach you how to build a fully functional database-driven website using PHP & MySQL. This book is authored by Kevin Yank who is a world-renowned leader in the field of web development.

It contains more than 450+ pages of great content and is presented in an easy and readable manner.

You will learn about the introduction of PHP & MySQL, relational database design, structured PHP programming, content management system, content formatting, cookies, sessions, and access control, MySQL administration, advanced SQL queries, and many more.

Definitely a good buy for a novice learner.

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Conclusion

So these are the 5 best PHP books for beginners & advanced programmers.

We encourage you to read these books and do a lot of practice on the code. We sincerely believe that you will quickly learn PHP.

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Wishing you success in your journey of learning PHP.