I’ve been programming in primarily PHP for the last 20 years, and sadly, most of the fun new projects do not use PHP. While the mechanics of every programming language are generally the same (except for you, Haskell), the idioms vary — how do you loop through lists, how do you clone an object, etc. I’ve always thought it would be nice to have a targeted refresher for each new language I encounter by framing it in terms of what the equivalent PHP would look like.

I couldn’t find anything like this (PHP-specific tutorials mostly went offline with GeoCities), so I’ve been putting together what I’m calling “X for Y Programmers.” It’s a series of short browser-based courses describing a new language for a developer who knows an existing language. e.g., “TypeScript for PHP Programmers” or “Rust for C# Programmers.”

X for Y covers 11 languages: PHP, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Python, Ruby, Rust, and TypeScript — you can learn the basics of any of these from the perspective of someone who knows any other of these. Walk through the tutorials right here, or you can clone the repo from GitHub and try them on your local machine.

Full disclosure: these tutorials are mostly AI-generated, but I’ve been using them and verifying their content as I use them to brush up on new languages. I’m publishing them to save you the tokens of generating them yourself.