About PHP and this tutorial

PHP is an extremely popular, Open Source scripting language, most commonly used on webservers to produce dynamic pages. The name "PHP" is a recursive acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" and was initially created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. As of today, the current version of PHP is version 5, with version 6 in the making.

As mentioned, PHP is mostly used on websites, which is what this tutorial will focus on. You may wish to set up your own test server, which is very easy to do, using the next couple of chapters to help you out. If you already have a server up and running, or at least access to a server running PHP 5, you can jump to one of the next sections, where we will start writing some PHP. You may go through all the chapters of this tutorial step by step, or you may jump between chapters to learn specific things - it's really up to you.

Enjoy!

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