Book Image

Learning PHP 7

By : Antonio L Zapata (GBP)
Book Image

Learning PHP 7

By: Antonio L Zapata (GBP)

Overview of this book

PHP is a great language for building web applications. It is essentially a server-side scripting language that is also used for general purpose programming. PHP 7 is the latest version with a host of new features, and it provides major backwards-compatibility breaks. This book begins with the fundamentals of PHP programming by covering the basic concepts such as variables, functions, class, and objects. You will set up PHP server on your machine and learn to read and write procedural PHP code. After getting an understanding of OOP as a paradigm, you will execute MySQL queries on your database. Moving on, you will find out how to use MVC to create applications from scratch and add tests. Then, you will build REST APIs and perform behavioral tests on your applications. By the end of the book, you will have the skills required to read and write files, debug, test, and work with MySQL.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning PHP 7
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 3. Understanding PHP Basics

Learning a new language is not easy. You need to understand not only the syntax of the language, but also its grammatical rules, that is, when and why to use each element of the language. Luckily for you, some languages come from the same root. For example, Spanish and French are Romance languages, as they both evolved from spoken Latin; that means that these two languages share a lot of rules, and if you already know French, learning Spanish becomes much easier.

Programming languages are quite the same. If you already know another programming language, it will be very easy for you to go through this chapter. If this is your first time though, you will need to understand all those grammatical rules from scratch, and so, it might take some more time. But fear not! We are here to help you in this endeavor.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following:

  • PHP files

  • Variables, strings, arrays, and operators in PHP

  • PHP in web applications

  • Control structures in...