PHP: Introduction for Beginners

Course Overview

PHP is a scripting language used to create dynamic, complex and robust Web pages. It is free and available for Web servers on many platforms, including UNIX/Linux, Windows and Macintosh. PHP is employed on millions of Web sites around the world and has quickly gained a large user base, ranging from small companies to government organisations.

In this course, you develop PHP scripts to perform a variety of tasks, culminating in the development of a full database-driven Web page. Exercises include:

• Accessing command line arguments from PHP scripts
• Generating Web pages dynamically using PHP
• Retrieving and manipulating form data
• Personalising Web site content using cookies
• Tracking user navigation on your Web site
• Integrating database content to generate dynamic Web pages
• Building modular scripts to enable code reusability

Audience

Those creating dynamic, database-driven Web sites. Basic experience with HTML is assumed. Programming experience in a language such as JavaScript, VB, ASP or Perl, is helpful.

Skills Gained

• Write effective, efficient PHP scripts
• Embed PHP scripts in HTML pages to create dynamic Web pages
• Manipulate data from Web page forms
• Track users as they navigate your site with cookies and other PHP features
• Structure PHP code using user-defined functions and external libraries
• Develop database-enabled Web applications using MySQL

Course Outline

Introduction to PHP

• Origins of PHP in the open source community
• Availability across multiple platforms
• Installing as a module for Apache Web Server and Microsoft Internet Information Server
• Running as a CGI engine for other Web servers

PHP language building blocks

• Comparing PHP with other Web scripting languages
• Investigating PHP data types
• Integers
• Floating point values
• Strings
• Booleans

Writing PHP scripts

• Storing values in scalar variables
• Employing ordinary and associative arrays
• Writing conditional expressions
• Implementing loops such as while, for and foreach
• Building complete scripts incorporating loops and conditional expressions

Writing Web Pages with PHP

Interacting with the server

• Outlining Web protocols
• Embedding PHP code into HTML pages
• Employing shortcuts to display single PHP values
• Determining how data is sent from forms to PHP scripts
• Creating dynamically-generated hyperlinks to call PHP scripts

Manipulating user input

• Presenting the user with input options via different HTML form elements
• Retrieving form data with $_POST and $_GET arrays
• Validating retrieved data
• Strategies for handling invalid input
• Storing state information using cookies

Applying Advanced Scripting Techniques

Exploiting the built-in functionality of PHP

• Formatting date and time information
• Manipulating string data
• Reading and writing data using file I/O functions
• Investigating other built-in features

Structuring PHP code

• Writing user-defined functions to structure your code
• Passing arguments and default values to functions
• Returning data from functions
• Accessing global variables
• Building code libraries for reusability
• Incorporating external PHP scripts with require and require_once

Building Complete Web Applications

Managing errors

• Investigating the HTTP header
• Suppressing on-screen error messages on production servers
• Configuring the php.ini file to control error messages

Handling problematic situations

• Troubleshooting problems when manipulating data
• Redirecting the browser to other pages
• Modifying the PHP configuration file to suit your needs
• Developing debugging strategies

Establishing database connectivity

• Creating and managing database connections
• Sending queries to the database server employing the most efficient methods
• Retrieving query results as associative arrays
• Looping through databases
• Displaying returned data on Web pages
• Avoiding potential problems by managing quotes and backslashes in data
• Closing the database connection