Learn PHP to build real web apps in four months
Four months of steady work — about an hour a day — takes someone who can already write a little code to a working, deployed database-backed web app in modern PHP. Roughly 120 hours total. You will not be a senior developer. You will stop thinking of PHP as the language from 2005.
4 months · ~120 hours · ship a small Laravel app with login, a database and a public URL
1.Laracasts — PHP For Beginners
Jeffrey Way's fifty-episode series is free, current, and builds a single small notes application from your first echo to routing, PDO, sessions, middleware and a hand-rolled service container. The point is not the notes app. The point is that by the end you have built, badly and by hand, every piece a framework will later do for you — so the framework stops being magic. Type every line yourself. Do not copy from the repo.
Free (Laracasts subscription not required for this series)
PHP For Beginners on Laracasts →2.PHP The Right Way
A free, community-maintained guide to how PHP is actually written now: Composer, PSR coding standards, strict types, PDO with prepared statements, password hashing, testing. Read it once end to end in a weekend. It is the antidote to the decade of insecure tutorials still ranking on Google — if a tutorial contradicts it, close the tutorial. Keep the official PHP manual open in another tab; it is better than most languages' docs.
Free
PHP The Right Way →3.Laravel — official Learn courses, then your own app
Laravel is where most new PHP work happens, and its official Getting Started course walks you through a full-stack app with routing, controllers, Blade views and Eloquent in about two hours of video. Do it in a week. Then spend the remaining two months building something you would actually use — a reading log, a club sign-up sheet, an invoicing tool — and deploy it. The documentation at laravel.com is good enough to be your only reference.
Free (hosting from ~$5/month on any small VPS)
Laravel Learn →If this doesn't fit you
If you are learning PHP because you inherited a WordPress site, skip Laravel. Do step 1 and step 2, then go through the developer courses on Learn WordPress, the project's free official training site, which cover themes, plugins and hooks. WordPress PHP is older in style and you will need to know both the modern way and why WordPress doesn't follow it.
Why this path
Most PHP learners either start with a framework and never understand what it does, or learn from ancient tutorials full of mysql_query and SQL injection. Jeffrey Way's course fixes the first problem by making you build the framework yourself; PHP The Right Way fixes the second. Laravel then turns that understanding into speed. If you have never programmed at all, add a month — the Laracasts series assumes nothing, but your patience will be tested. The deploy is the step everyone skips. Do it in week ten, not week sixteen.