I personally push it to production More on reddit.com

Get an experienced developer to talk to them about projects they've done for 30 minutes. This, in my opinion, will give you a much better indicator of how good a candidate is than any "skills assessment". There are also factors which a skills assessment can't judge such as ability/desire to learn. Code tests tend to only test for "trivia" knowledge. (Even worse if they're actually trying to catch people with "gotcha" edge cases in the language that may never be encountered in actual coding / trivial details developers just don't normally think about) Even before the recent rise of AI, which can frequently answer such tests well enough to pass, people would train to pass tests but not be able to work well with actual code. And that's ignoring cases where candidates pay someone else to take the test for them. More on reddit.com

Some people recommend Traversy Media and Programming with Gio . Not without blunders, but definitely not that crap usually found around. But personally a find books more suitable for learning. I have one to recommend, PHP&MySQL by Jon Duckett. The plus of this book is that you are downloading a zip file that contains every single code example, as well as the every stage of the final project code, so you can run the code along the reading. I find this approach much more involving than just watching someone coding. More on reddit.com

Protip: you do not need a webserver to use PHP. You can download and install PHP locally, and then run scripts from the command line without issue. Let's say you have a test PHP page at c:\php\test.php. Just open up a command prompt and type: C:\Users\Me> php c:\php\test.php But the online sites are cool if you don't/can't install PHP... here's another one, it offers several different versions of PHP: http://codepad.viper-7.com/ More on reddit.com