PHP

PHP is a high level, dynamic, interpreted scripting language. Originally it was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 and stood for Personal Home Page. It began in 1994 as a set of Common Gateway Interface binaries written in the C programming language. The Danish/Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf created these Personal Home Page Tools to replace a small set of Perl scripts used to maintain his personal homepage. It augments raw HTML by allowing significant interactivity and increased functionality. It has become popular in recent years as it is easy to begin working with and supported by a good majority of web hosting companies. MediaWiki, the server software for Wikiversity, makes extensive use of PHP.

Before starting the course, we suggest you go over the following:

• Introduction to Programming recommended
• Introduction to Computer Science

The course will help you learn PHP by going over material step by step and explaining relevant concepts. Reference materials will be complemented by learning guides, which will expand on the reference by elaborating the how and why of each topic.

• Introduction to PHP – A basic outline of PHP.
• Introduction to PHP/Variables – Extensive guide on variables in PHP
• Introduction to PHP/Constants – Constants in PHP
• Responding to HTML forms with PHP – Getting started using PHP with web forms
• Generating a receipt with PHP – Calculating totals and discounts from your web form.
• PHP challenges – Building your PHP skills towards storing data in a database.
• PHP Dates – Working with dates and times
• PHP databases – Basics behind connectivity and query methods.
• PHP Debugging – Basics on debugging code

• Introduction to PHP Learning Guide – Guided tour of the above Introduction to PHP reference, in development

• 25 Essential PHP Functions – A list of functions important to be familiar with. Suggested reading for those who have completed the lessons.
• Dynamic websites with PHP – Learning PHP specifically to create dynamic websites.
• b:Programming:PHP – An excellent wikibook on PHP programming that supplements this course

• Official site of PHP
• PHP Tutorials
• PHP Cheatsheet