Topic: good PHP/CSS/XHTML book for a newbie ?

[TomW]

I've been running an SMF board for 9 months now, and am frankly  embarassed that I don't have much technical knowledge in PHP/CSS/Javascript to understand SMF in any detail.  Is there a good PHP/CSS/Javascript for someone new to the topic, but familiar with software development ?

[Arantor]

The problem is that the web today demands knowledge in 5 different languages to be good at it - and really the solution is a book for each topic; knowledge of CSS selectors won't help you much in PHP, and not really in Javascript - though it might help in XHTML.

The thing to do really is to investigate XHTML/CSS, Javascript, PHP and SQL individually, then bring them together, rather than find an all-in-one book - it'd be huge if it's even remotely thorough.

[Caelum]

I agree with Arantor.

http://www.w3schools.com is pretty good, but in the end, what you really learn from in my experience is just messing with files you don't understand. With some help + a lot of googling, you'll get there.

[TomW]

Good points.  I have used w3schools when I had a specific question, and have modified the css file, etc., but it has all been trial and error.  Primarily I'm interested in good books on the various subjects so that I can build a foundation, then onward to best practices and techniques.

[Caelum]

Yeah. A good foundation, in my opinion, is just understanding most functions, what they do, messing with their values and realizing that if you change them to another place in the document, they appear elsewhere in the browser.

Sorry, that's the best I can do, as I never read any books on the subject