On Reddit.com a reader has asked the community what they think he needs to do to progress his PHP skills past the "little bit" he's learned so far.

Last summer I started learning a little bit of PHP, knowing HTML and CSS drove me towards wanting to learn some PHP for fun. I went through a pretty simple book, and made some simple websites (registration and message system, user submitted data, file uploads) using mostly tutorials which I tweaked a little bit. Since last summer I haven't learned anything new, but now that summer is coming along again I might be a bit bored, so I have been thinking of attempting to learn even more.

Suggestions included in the comments are things like:

• Learn about software architecture.
• Understand your environment.
• I very highly suggest learning a PHP framework.
• http://www.phptherightway.com
• Start learning industry tools for PHP. It will all influence your coding style, and illustrate why some styles are considered best practices.
• To add to the other suggestions, I recommend becoming a regular contributor to one or more open source projects.
• What helped me a lot was to write my own micro framework using OOP that I can now use for future websites and web applications.
• Come up with a 'complex' web site/application idea and get to it. Bonus points if you can launch it and make money off it (half kidding).

You can read the full set of comments for more good suggestions here.