Editor introduction

When you're programming, your best friend is your editor. This is of course true for PHP as well, but while you only write in one language when doing applications with e.g. C++, you will need to write HTML and perhaps even CSS and JavaScript too, when doing websites with PHP. Sometimes you will have all of it mixed into one document, and without a proper editor, you can quickly get lost.

Perhaps you already have an editor, capable of handling PHP code properly, and that's fine. If not, this tutorial is written and tested with TSW WebCoder, and in the next couple of chapters, we will look into getting the most out of this editor. I really recommend that you give WebCoder a try - it will make learning and using PHP much, much easier.

Download TSW WebCoder and have a look at the following chapters, where we set it up some of the features which will really help you out.

Table Of Contents

• About PHP

Requirements

• Introduction
• Webserver
• PHP
• Using it

The editor

• Introduction
• Previewing
• Syntax checking
• Debugging

Basic PHP

• Hello world
• PHP tags
• Variables
• If statements
• More if statements
• The switch statement
• Loops
• Including files
• Functions

Data types

• Introduction
• Working with numbers
• Working with strings
• More strings
• Working with arrays
• More arrays

Classes

• Introduction
• Defining and using a class
• Constructors and destructors
• Visibility
• Inheritance
• Abstract classes
• Static classes
• Class constants
• The "final" keyword

PHP and MySQL

• Introduction
• Connecting to MySQL
• Retrieving data
• The WHERE part
• The ORDER BY part
• The LIMIT part
• Handling errors

State

• Cookies

Working with forms

• GET and POST
• Validating form input