I started my PHP in Jan 2002. I had been wondering how will I be able to create 1000 of pages at that time. And while surfing the web I heard about php.
Well brought a book "PHP in 24 hours" - Techmedia book.
Didn't read it
But then I met an accident and had nothing to do for timepass. So I picked it up and finished it reading. After reading it I downloaded phpTriad and installed a localhost on my windows system.
Tried some examples from the book itself. And then made some rough pages of my own. Soon I got my first and the biggest project ever.
Started coding it without thinking for another second and after 8 months of sleepless nights, headaches, illness and 150,000 lines of php code my product was ready for launching.
It is still selling as a good script. Might have earned 4K's or so from it till now. And its still going.
The thing is if you have some experience in other programming languages and know the fundamentals of loops and IF's along with variable scope and other stuff. PHP is the most easiest to get started.
Other things you should know for PHP.
- HTML [Basic thing. Most of us know]
- MySQL [A bit complicated when it comes to bigger databases]
In MySQL the database structure is the main thing. After that only thing that remains are the queries from the php script for fetching, editing, or saving some data.
- Photoshop [If you are going to make your own designs]