I used to have a PHP tutorial here, and it was somewhat heavily downloaded. It needed a revision that never happened. Anyway, it's lost, so here's a new one.

Writing tutorials for newbies is fairly difficult. The subject matter is simple, but the exposition needs to be deliberate. Additionally, written instructions are linear, and follow a single path through the instruction. The problem is, we don't learn in a linear manner; we learn through repetition and by trying different things. So there's a mismatch between how we learn, and how we're taught.

The short solution is for learners to try different tutorials, and for tutorial writers to expose the material using different examples or in a different order.

Here's another take on learning PHP.

(Planned path: Reading Data, Defining New Functions, Reading Lots of Data and Arrays of Arrays, Split, Looping Over Arrays, Libraries of Functions, Writing Data, Data Formats (serialized, base64, CSV, tab delimited), Databases, Regular Expressions, Data Validation, Objects as Data Structures, Objects for Program Organization and Encapsulation, Looping Over Directories, A Database Abstraction Class, A Directory Abstraction Class.)