Microsoft School of PHP: Now open for classes!

PHP remains one of the most popular web development languages. Combining dynamic, edit/save/refresh development with extensibility - PHP is used by Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and a myriad of other web content management systems. Intensive frameworks, such as CakePHP provide strongly structured development methodologies to this popular language.

With PHP 5.2, and more intensively in PHP 5.3, Microsoft has invested engineer-time on improving the performance of PHP on Windows.

Apart from supporting the base PHP and extensions, Microsoft has also created plugins to ease PHP deployment and management in IIS and support for SQL Server (and subsequently SQL Azure).

These initiatives have culminated in the Web Platform Installer.

To assist web developers with learning the varied Microsoft-PHP tie-ins, Microsoft created the PHPOnWindowsTrainingKit. This is a set of labs, demos and code showing How-tos.

Microsoft Australia has created a set of over 35 screencasts using the Training kit as a guide that appear in the Microsoft School of PHP.