Welcome to Learning to Program in PHP
What is PHP?
According to PHP's official site, “PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development. Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world."
PHP is a recursive acronym which stands for "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.”
Since its inception in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP has become incredibly popular and nearly ubiquitous. Some of the largest websites and most popular content management systems have been written in PHP. Consequently, there are many jobs available for competent PHP developers. And there is a large community of programmers who constantly share and help each other learn and grow in the language.
PHP was developed as a back end programming language for web development. While you can use it to do almost any kind of programming on almost any kind of platform for almost any kind of application, it is most at home on the web.
PHP is weakly typed, object-oriented, and server based (normally) and can be embedded into HTML. It can connect to lots of types of databases and has hundreds of extensions which expand what it can do.
How does PHP work?
PHP is an executable (a program) that lives on your server. It parses through PHP code. That code can be passed to the executable in several ways, but usually you pass it a file with PHP code. It executes the code and returns the result. Typically, a web server like NGINX or Apache calls the PHP executable and then returns its results to the user.
Learning programming with PHP
There are thousands of options of languages to choose to learn to program. Given its popularity, PHP is a great choice to learn programming. There are lots of other good choices, too, but this site focuses on PHP, so here is where we will start.
For those that already know a programming language or several programming languages and want to add PHP to their skill set, this course will teach the syntax, style, and approach to programming with PHP.
Course objectives
If you work through all the lessons and do all the exercises, you should:
have a solid understanding of PHP’s syntax
how to install PHP and write a program with it
how to connect to a database with PHP
how to receive form submissions
have a fundamental understanding of programming logic
have a fundamental understanding of object oriented programming
have a fundamental understanding of unit testing
Things this course does not cover:
data structures
design patterns
algorithms
cyclomatic complexity
time complexity or big O notation
architectures
frameworks
security
front end web development (html, css, javascript, etc.)