can any one recommend a ....

[duhawkz]

decent beginners book on php?
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"The guy is a worthless cunt and I honestly believe I would be a slightly happier person if he died." - Chris-Red

[P.addy]

tizag helped me

https://www.tizag.com/phpT/

[Frost]

Depends on what you want to do. there seems to be 2 ways of doing php about.
You can do it as a script where you just stick it all in the one function and call that. This is easy to learn, gets results fast but isn't great if you're working with other people. You can learn to code like this from interweb examples like the w3 schools page and browsing the php api for useful methods.
You can do it Object Orientated. This is what you really should do, but plenty of people find it hard to learn, or find it takes too long to do. You'd be best of using a book for this. Learn PHP 5.3

https://books.google.com/books?id=XkZRKAAACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&l=220
https://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?hl=en&safe=off&q=php5&psj=1&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=20881l20881l0l21194l1l1l0l0l0l0l200l200l2-1l1l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1024&bih=485&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=10658495216032686067&sa=X&ei=9iNJT8GRNMai8gP145WoDg&ved=0CHkQ8wIwCA

But it assumes you know SQL and how the web works and stuff. If you don't know either of those things you might need a book on LAMP or a dummies guide sort of thing.

[Recluso]

Sam's 24 hours books.

Very straight-forward and newbie friendly.
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[duhawkz]

Perhaps I should explain what I am looking at doing,

I am says admin and I am use to writing vbscipts and powershell scripts to do admin type things. We use a help desk system (support works) that has a my SQL back end that can produce report for management that can be scheduled but it only produces them in .mht format which my boss was moaning about as he wanted them in PDF format as he couldnt open them on his phone.

Any how you can do a lot of additional reporting in the back end using php, after a bit of googling and bit of guidence from one of our developers I knocked up the report he was after in php, fpdf and chart director and got it to mail the report out.

Any way I am sure I will need to do more of them, I just wanted to learn and get more efficent at it as it took me about 3 days to do the last one.
____________________
"The guy is a worthless cunt and I honestly believe I would be a slightly happier person if he died." - Chris-Red