Tips to Learn PHP and How to Answer PHP Interview Questions?

Before you start learning PHP, take a moment to plan the approach in learning the programming language. Professional developers who have learned PHP have already spent a significant number of hours mastering this skill.

To emulate them, you need to make sure that you are highly motivated and, most importantly, willing to invest much time to learn PHP quickly and efficiently.

The slower and more inefficient your learning methods, the longer it will take you to get a job in PHP development or create the application you want.

What is worse about slow and inefficient learning is that you will most likely give up on your endeavor altogether. Research from Harvard University and MIT has found that only 4% of students who enroll in online courses complete them.

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So how can you help the other 96% of people code?

Here are a few tips for learning PHP in the right way. The tips are designed in a way that will help you learn efficiently, stay motivated, and avoid potential difficulties.

• Make sure you want to learn PHP –

If you came across this article as a novice programming user, you probably don’t have any preferences about which programming language you want to learn. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it can create a problem later when you find that a different programming language suits your goals much better.

PHP is a server-side programming language that is widely used in web development. If you find in the next few months that you’d instead work at Rockstar and help build the next version of Grand Theft Auto, it would have been better to learn C or C ++. These languages ​​are used much more often in game development.

However, there are many good reasons to learn PHP –

• You want to take your WordPress knowledge to the next level. As of September 2018, 7% of all websites use WordPress. Since PHP powers WordPress, there is an enormous demand for PHP developers. If you want to use other content management systems like Joomla or Drupal, you must know that these were also created with PHP.
• Compared to other programming languages, PHP is considered to be relatively easy to learn.
• Because PHP is native to the web, you can get simple projects online much faster and with less difficulty. This means that you will see the results of your efforts much quicker than if you learned another language.

So before you get into custom PHP development, make sure it suits your needs and future projects.

• Active learning is better than passive learning –

One of the best ways to render your learning more effective is to learn actively rather than passively. Passive learning means that you simply take in the information by seeing, reading, or listening to it. Active learning means that you apply what you learn directly in a project.

Educators agree that active learning strategies are better than passive ones. The only problem is that creating a dynamic learning experience is usually more complicated.

The Learn Programming PHP course is an excellent example of an active learning experience. To complete each lesson in the course, you will need to solve a problem using the previously learned resources.

An example of a passive learning experience would be watching a YouTube video with a teacher speaking to a presentation and explaining features to you. Such passive learning experiences can still be beneficial. Perhaps your YouTube teacher offers you the best explanation you’ve ever heard.

So the advice is not that you should avoid passive learning entirely, but instead that you should do it actively. You can write down the examples of a lecture or a video yourself, make changes to the code and see what happens.

• The PHP syntax is sensitive –

In your coding education and your life as a professional developer, you lose many hours of your life to syntax errors. A syntax error means that you wrote something that PHP does not understand. This could be because you wrote the name of a variable differently from when you created it or forgot to insert a semicolon at the end of your statement. You will very often forget these semicolons.

Other programming languages, such as JavaScript, use semicolons a little more liberally than PHP. But PHP can also be quite liberal: in some situations, it is considered a good practice not to close PHP tags. In other conditions, however, a missing semicolon terminates the entire application. So be careful with your syntax. It is also important that you pay attention to upper and lower case letters.

However, just being aware of and knowing the probability of syntax errors is usually helpful before working with a PHP development company. You know where to look first if your program isn’t working. Before you delete your entire program and restart it, first look for syntax errors.

• Understand technical terms –

One difficulty you may encounter early in learning PHP is your teacher’s technical language or instructions. However, a good teacher can explain PHP to you in simple language. Once you get to the advanced topics, your instructor will need to use more technical language to describe higher complexity concepts.

It is crucial that you study the words in your new vocabulary and understand sentences that use two or more jargon words. Unfortunately, understanding PHP is almost impossible if you don’t understand the concepts behind it, and you need the specific language for that. A simple example will be if you know “how to pass a variable as an argument to a function.”

Any right PHP course that you find online will cover the concepts of variables, functions, and arguments as part of the PHP learning plan’s basics. So, at the end of the course, the sentence should make sense for you. If you think that it is challenging to learn the technical terms, you can always just write down the unfamiliar words and look them up. Later, you can quickly check their meaning by looking at where your teacher is using the words.

PHP Interview Questions –

PHP developers are in demand. No wonder! Because hardly any website can do without PHP. PHP developers’ tasks are the reprogramming of dynamic, database-based web offers and their maintenance and further development.

The PHP developer job profile includes technical skills. An understanding of the user guidance and the interaction of graphical user interfaces with databases is also necessary. Data protection rules and security requirements are also relevant.

The job prospects for PHP experts are generally good. But at the same time, the demands on the job are high. The technology has to work safely and stably, and the responsibility is considerable.

Here are some of the PHP interview questions often asked to PHP programmers –

1. How would you explain the job of a PHP developer to a child?

As a PHP developer, expect this question in the interview. Your empathy will be tested. You should abstract from your specific activity. See your job as a PHP developer from a distance. It is conceivable first to explain the child’s perspective. From this, you develop a suitable answer. It would be unfortunate to call explaining impossible.

Sure, the PHP developer’s work is complex. But you can explain everything in a way that everyone can understand. It depends on the level of abstraction.

2. How would you try to solve a problem that arose on your team?

Teams don’t work together for fun. You have a professional mission. This allows a certain emotional distance. However, development teams are prone to conflict. Personal aversions can show up. Blockages or disputes hinder a sensible solution. As a member of a development team or as its leader, you have to resolve the conflicts. This is important for the team’s success. Sitting out is not a solution. On the contrary, it’s part of the problem.

3. At what level of competence do you see yourself as a PHP developer?

No master has fallen from the sky yet. However, one should know how to become one. This also applies to PHP developers. Therefore, with this question, the understanding of one’s limits is required. Don’t pretend you know everything. Don’t pretend you can solve every software problem right away.

That would be met with skepticism. Software development is constantly changing. Therefore, it is not crucial for companies whether an applicant has mastered all the software details. The developer must have strategies in place to stay informed and on the ball.

4. Which technological developments will influence your work as a PHP developer in the next few years?

Can the PHP developer think outside the box? Does he know what trends are being discussed in the PHP developer community? Companies ask themselves this question. They want their products to remain competitive. Applicants should, therefore, be informed. Topics such as IoT, Codelgniter, Symfony, ZEND, Fat-Free, or CakePHP are to be discussed and evaluated. A good PHP developer shows the basis on which he estimates these trends.

Conclusion –

While most of the tips are aimed at beginners, advanced PHP learners will also find it here and find some tips and recommendations useful.

By now, you have probably done some research and decided to learn PHP. If so, there is only one thing left to do: Start learning PHP!

Author Bio –

Albert Smith is a digital marketing manager with Hidden Brains, a leading enterprise web & mobile app development company specializing in mobile & web applications, IoT, cloud and big data services. He provides innovative ways to help tech companies, startups and large enterprises build their brand.

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