On DZone.com today there's a new post that welcomes those coming from Java over to PHP with a few recommendations and suggestions about what's different and some things they might find familiar in the transition.

We are welcoming some new colleagues that come from a Java background in the Onebip team, both from the development and operations field. Here's a primer on learning PHP in this situation, that you may find useful when introducing similar people in your PHP-based projects.

He breaks it up into a few sections:

• the "absolute basics" (like the differences in variable handling)
• things to not care about (like procedural PHP or the installation of Apache+PHP)
• how to "write to a graph" (things like PDO, DateTime)
• things to watch out for (like == vs === and some php.ini settings)

He also recommends doing some coding katas with TDD to give you a "crash course" in the language and help you learn from more than just reading.