Advise for an Aspiring PHP Developer

A self described “aspiring PHP developer” recently asked me for advise on how to improve his skills since there were no PHP offerings at his school. Here was the advise I gave him.

Welcome to the world of PHP.

I have learned the most by following and participating in the discussion at the
SitePoint advanced PHP forum
(http://www.sitepoint.com/).

There are two coding techniques you can study that will pay great dividends:
Unit Testing (and in particular Test Driven Development, see
http://simpletest.org/ and http://www.testdriven.com/) and the use
of Design Patterns (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/
http://home.earthlink.net/~huston2/dp/patterns.html
and http://www.phppatterns.com/).

A project to investigate which combines much of this is WACT
(http://phpwact.org/).

Some good blogs:
http://www.procata.com/blog/feed/rss2/
http://www.lastcraft.com/blog/wp-rss2.php
http://netevil.org/feeds/rss.xml
and many others you can find through
http://www.planet-php.net/.

I would be remiss in not letting you know I have written a book on these
subjects as well :)
php|a

Hopefully that gives you something to chew on!

Looking this over, I realize I left out a critical resourse of the PHP Manual and the associated user comments, a great resource for PHP developers.

What advise would you give to an aspiring programmer?