PHP/MySQL Training from Lynda.com

Anyone have any experience with the training offered at Lynda.com? Specifically I'm looking for the PHP/MySQL training as I'm tired or doing bits of code here and there and endlessly searching the internet and forums to find what I need.

I'll let someone else speak to Lynda.com but I also wanted to point you to our Database Starter Kit for PHP and some of our other free resources - some beginning, some more advanced.

Check out the web dev workflow guide, especially the developer tab.
web-dev-workflow.php

I have those but they don't really get me into coding in PHP, writing MySQL queries and such. I've struggled and dealt with piecing together bits of code to get things to work without really know what it meant...just see my prior posts with basic things that I have asked about.

I need to go beyond what it DW and WebAssist provide with extensions. I've found a few times that I need to customize things written by WA because the extension does do it and then spend days in the forums, with support and searching the internet for answers.

Originally Said By: Travis250923

  Anyone have any experience with the training offered at Lynda.com? Specifically I'm looking for the PHP/MySQL training as I'm tired or doing bits of code here and there and endlessly searching the internet and forums to find what I need.  

Travis,

Probably the best book I have purchased on PHP application design is "PHP Solutions Dynamic Web Design Made Easy" by David Powers. I carry it everywhere I go in case I need to look something up quickly. I have about a dozen other books on the subject and they don't compare to the ease to understand or the content provided as PHP Solutions.

David Powers has written a couple of good books on php which I have found very useful.

PHP solutions is the best php book I have used, and the essential guide to dreamweaver cs3 (cs4) with CSS, Ajax and Php is also well worth reading

Craig,

That is a good one too... I read that when I wanted to make sure I was doing everything possible with Dreamweaver... another one, if anyone is feeling froggy, is David Powers book for PHP Object Oriented Solutions.

I guess I have come to the conclusion that Powers is probably the best author on the subject matter.

Originally Said By: Travis250923

  Anyone have any experience with the training offered at Lynda.com? Specifically I'm looking for the PHP/MySQL training as I'm tired or doing bits of code here and there and endlessly searching the internet and forums to find what I need.  

I'm just starting to look at the PHP videos at Lynda.com, so I can't really speak to how well they cover the Dreamweaver/PHP subject specifically. I will say I wish they had a few more selections for it. I started watching one, and got hung up at the point where the instructor has you write a new variable in the path of windows vista system variables. It was supposed to make it so you could see your mysql connection when you typed in "mysql" in the cmd prompt window. However, it didn't work when I changed the path (I suspect it is because the path already was changed by IIS 7 when I tried to get that working, it never did so I switched to xammp). So, since it wouldn't work the way he said it would, I thought my local testing server wasn't going to work. I ended up watching a david powers tutorial on setting up a phptesting site in dreamweaver, and lo and hehold, my testing server worked for that!

I thought that was GREAT news, except when I tried my testing server with a real site--not working. This is all such greek to me. So I am still working on it.

BUT, I will say about Lynda.com in general, I subscribe at home, and we have a multi user subscription at work. We find the tutorials in general for all the adobe products to be incredibly valuable. I wish they had some on WA products, but it is still worth it for the other products.

Here is my wishlist for WA: chatroom support like Hostgator has (doesn't have to be 24 hour, open till 8pm west coast time would be great). Forum support has not been very efficient for me. I appreciate the answers I get from the WA team like Jason and Eric, both of them are great and really do help. But it often takes hours to get responses (understandable in this environment) and I think it has to be hard for them too, because how do you track what you have tried and what you haven't with several customers over hours instead of minutes? The hostgator tech support has helped me in minutes to find answers to problems, and I think they are able to do so because it is all right there and you go back and forth until you find the answer. With talent like Jason and Eric and the others here, I think it would actually be a HUGE help to them too. I just don't think the forum is an efficient way to do tech support for either the customer or the techs. Hopefully they will be able to go to live chat at some point. If they do it for sales, for people who haven't paid anything yet, I would hope they could do it for those of us who have put our money on the table. Just a thought.