PHP course: the 10 best in 2026

Best for beginners who want modern PHP 8 through practical projects. It starts with one small example per video, moves to four small projects, then builds a guestbook and a blog with an admin panel, covering MVC with your own Laravel-style framework, error handling, sessions and cookies, security and databases.

It has 4.5 stars from 200 reviews and more than 1,900 students. It runs about 20 hours with four quizzes and was last updated in November 2025.

Best for complete beginners who want a short introduction. It covers variables, math and comparison operators, if/else statements, arrays, loops and functions, plus setting up an online development environment, version control with Git and GitHub, and hosting on Heroku.

It has 4.6 stars from 766 reviews and more than 5,300 students. It runs about six hours and was last updated in November 2023.

Best for learners who know basic PHP and want to master object-oriented programming. Edwin Diaz teaches OOP concepts through hands-on, real-life projects, building toward a complex, dynamic web application.

It has 4.5 stars from more than 4,200 reviews and more than 26,000 students. It runs about 20 hours and was last updated in September 2024.

Best for beginners who want fundamentals followed by a framework-style project. It covers data types, arrays, control structures, functions, OOP, superglobals and PDO, then builds a job listing website with a custom Laravel-like router, CRUD, authentication and authorisation with middleware, search and secure prepared statements.

It has 4.5 stars from more than 2,000 reviews and more than 12,000 students. It runs about 18 hours and was last updated in January 2025.

Best for PHP developers who need to use and build APIs. It explains how APIs and HTTP requests work, consuming APIs from PHP, REST and RESTful design, and building a RESTful API from scratch with plain PHP and MySQL, with API key and JWT access token authentication.

It has 4.5 stars from more than 1,300 reviews and more than 8,000 students. It runs about five hours with three quizzes and 80 resources, and was updated in April 2026.

Best for PHP developers who want fewer bugs through automated tests. It covers unit testing with PHPUnit, assertions, testing functions and classes, dependencies and fixtures, exceptions, mocks and stubs with Mockery, dependency injection, test-driven development, and testing protected, private, abstract and static code.

It has 4.6 stars from more than 2,800 reviews and more than 12,000 students. It runs under three hours with five quizzes and 52 resources, and was updated in April 2026. We lowered it slightly because it covers one specific skill.

Best for beginners who want a long, project-heavy course. Edwin covers procedural PHP, object-oriented PHP and MySQL, with a practical lecture at the end of every section and a CMS project that brings it all together.

It has 4.4 stars from more than 25,000 reviews and more than 129,000 students, the most on this list. It runs about 40 hours and was updated in May 2026. Some HTML is needed.

Best for beginners who want to build a real CMS while learning. Dave Hollingworth teaches PHP and MySQL from installing a web server, writing secure and reusable code to programming standards, styling with Bootstrap, integrating third-party code and using a relational database, building a content management system from scratch.

It has 4.7 stars from more than 4,100 reviews and more than 24,000 students. It runs about 14 hours with 33 quizzes, and was last updated in April 2025.

Best for PHP developers ready to structure code like a professional. You build an MVC framework from scratch, learning to separate PHP from HTML, create pretty URLs, advanced routing with regular expressions, dependency injection, templating, middleware and object-oriented techniques, then a full CRUD application.

It has 4.8 stars from more than 3,300 reviews, the highest rating here, and more than 14,000 students. It runs about six and a half hours with four quizzes and 176 resources, and was updated in April 2026.