[Kyttias]

I actually bought myself a notebook (and it's a great time of year to do so, the overstock from the back to school supplies should be dirt cheap) and went at it like it was a high school textbook and took notes. I'll usually strip out any unimportant sentences, and write down things that might be. Eventually I figured out what was and what important and start writing down just example code. I retain things better when I write them down myself and find things faster on a cheat sheet I hand wrote.

Comment. Your. Code. When writing down examples from books don't assume you'll understand it later. Write down what it does in plain english - "pseudo-code".

I wrote down tons of psuedo-code (in the back of the notebook, going the opposite way from my actual notes) with just ideas of things I wanted to try to implement. Functions, mostly. It may seem silly to write down code on paper, especially when you don't have access to a computer to test things out or even know for sure what the formatting needs to be, but coding in any language is understanding the flow of things. No matter the language, basic concepts don't really change all that much.

And the #1 tip with mixing PHP and Javascript is that jQuery is the way to go and there is more than one way to do shorthand for ajax transactions, and to experiment a lot. The annoying thing is, ajax isn't just for PHP - it's also for pulling content from text, html, xml and json. It's actually very hard to find examples that properly cover both sides for PHP! Books on pure PHP or pure JS/jQuery... neither spend enough time covering ajax! I wish I could recommend a particular book, but I'm afraid nothing from collection springs to mind as immediately helpful - I've learned a lot from Google. (Maybe I should write my own book. =P)