Introduction
PHP has become one of the most prominent web development languages in production today. Part of this is because it is so easy for someone to dabble with it and achieve immediate results. It takes very little expertise to incorporate PHP into an otherwise straightforward html page, and that makes it popular with many designers.
The fact that those first few steps are so easy helped the language achieve some of its initial adoption, but that’s only part of the reason it’s become so widespread. While a web designer might appreciate a simple way to rotate a banner ad, or change some style based on the date or time, a skilled web developer can actually power the entire website, from serving up content, to managing access permissions, and interacting with data from around the internet. PHP is a powerful language, and while that power can be dangerous, it can be incredibly freeing to a developer.
Most large websites, including heavyweights such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Paypal, provide developers tools for interacting with them through their own PHP scripts.
Many websites – large and small – use PHP to power their content management system, or CMS.
And there are a number of open source projects, written in PHP, that harness the collective skill of thousands to create truly great software. My personal website, powered by WordPress, is one example of such an effort. Others you might be familiar with include Joomla, Drupal, and phpBB.
The goal of this training course will be to take you from a basic understanding of PHP to what can be called an advanced level. At this point, you should already be comfortable writing functions and classes, using the basic language constructs like loops and conditional statements, connecting your scripts with a database and interacting with the server’s filesystem. You should know some of the more common functions provided by PHP itself, and for the most part, you should be able to look at another developer’s PHP code and figure out what it does.
At an advanced level however, you’ll need to be aware of the various tools and libraries available to you as a developer and how to incorporate them. You’ll want to gain a deep understanding of how object-oriented programming should work in PHP, so you can put it to the best possible use in your scripts. And perhaps most important, you’ll need to learn how to secure your websites and web applications against all the ways someone might try to exploit them.
PHP has earned its place of prominence because of its ease of use, power, and scalability. It is well supported, and well documented, and is unlikely to lose its popularity within the foreseeable future.
October 13 2009 12:14 am | introduction and PHP tutorial scripts