

Ask HN: The best PHP book for Ruby programmer? - 1gor

I need to learn some PHP after several years of serious hacking in Ruby. Of all Ruby books I've read "The Ruby Way" by Hal Fulton was the most practical and fun to follow. For example, while telling you about basic data structures it would also give you a recipe for implementing a sparse matrix or how to use arrays as mathematical sets.<p>What is the best book that focuses on PHP as a programming language, rather than on building websites?
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tremendo
Not aware of any book that specifically addresses the move from Ruby to PHP,
but you may find the reverse helpful:
[http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ndphpr/rails-for-php-
develope...](http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ndphpr/rails-for-php-developers)

Of course there's plenty of PHP-specific books. I found one by Wrox to be very
helpful: Professional PHP Programming.

PHP syntax is similar to Perl (and/or C) where blocks are delimited by curly
brackets, statements by semi-colons and object to method (or attribute) is
referenced by two characters vs. Ruby's dot. So in essence, you'll be using
that Shift key a lot more.

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crnixon
_Heart of Darkness_ , Joseph Conrad

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smoody
My opinion: The online documentation. It takes a while to sort through it, but
it really is a great resource as are the reader-submitted comments at the end
of each page.

