Web Developer

I would like to become a professional web developer in PHP. What do I know and How do I improve My Skills?

I really recommend Usenet (= news groups). There’s no better way to find out how much you really know and how much you still have to learn than reading about the challenges that other developers are facing every day. Usenet is a very old part of the internet, it predates the WWW by over 10 years, but it’s still running strong. You can access it with most email clients such as Thunderbird or Outlook Express. The advantage is that you’ll get the new messages just like e-mails, and don’t have to go to 20 different web forums.

You can also use groups.google.com to access news groups, but I don’t recommend it (except as an archive).

Subscribe to the comp.lang.php newsgroup, download the last 500-1000 posts, read whatever looks interesting, and from that point on, follow the discussions and participate wherever you can. Answer the easy questions, ask questions yourself, try to understand everything that’s said. Other groups that are worthwhile to subscribe to are comp.infosystems.www.authoring.misc (everything about (X)HTML and CSS) and comp.lang.javascript (very high level discussions there).

It’s quite likely that your ISP runs a news server, probably named news.providername.com, but many ISPs have dropped Usenet access lately to avoid legal issues. Usenet is and always was a little anarchic, but don’t let that stop you. If your ISP doesn’t run a local news server, use “aioe.org”. They’re free to read and post. They don’t allow binaries, but that’s okay since you’re only interested in the discussion groups anyway.

Before you post yourself, lurk a bit, read as much as you can so you can avoid some of the beginner faux-pas.

Other than Usenet, there are quite a few websites with interesting articles out there: webreference.com and weberdev.com would be two examples. But (IMO) nothing beats participation.

Hope that helps!

Tutorial#1 – MSDN – How to become a web developer/programmer