Book Image

The PHP Workshop

By : Jordi Martinez, Alexandru Busuioc, David Carr, Markus Gray, Vijay Joshi, Mark McCollum, Bart McLeod, M A Hossain Tonu
Book Image

The PHP Workshop

By: Jordi Martinez, Alexandru Busuioc, David Carr, Markus Gray, Vijay Joshi, Mark McCollum, Bart McLeod, M A Hossain Tonu

Overview of this book

Do you want to build your own websites, but have never really been confident enough to turn your ideas into real projects? If your web development skills are a bit rusty, or if you've simply never programmed before, The PHP Workshop will show you how to build dynamic websites using PHP with the help of engaging examples and challenging activities. This PHP tutorial starts with an introduction to PHP, getting you set up with a productive development environment. You will write, execute, and troubleshoot your first PHP script using a built-in templating engine and server. Next, you'll learn about variables and data types, and see how conditions and loops help control the flow of a PHP program. Progressing through the chapters, you'll use HTTP methods to turn your PHP scripts into web apps, persist data by connecting to an external database, handle application errors, and improve functionality by using third-party packages. By the end of this Workshop, you'll be well-versed in web application development, and have the knowledge and skills to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with PHP.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we learned how to use PHP's package manager, Composer, to include third-party packages in your application. By doing so, you saw how to benefit from the open source solutions to problems that have already been solved and drastically reduce the amount of code you must produce and maintain in your own projects.

Web services are a technology that is enabling a lot of innovation in our industry. There are countless web services available on the internet, with some requiring a paid account to access their service and some freely available to the public as long as you don't surpass a rate limit. This is important because it means you don't have to own all the data you use in your app. You can leverage the data and systems others have built and then build on top of them, stringing them together to provide functionality that is unique to your application. PHP is a language built specifically for the web in the age of web APIs. By some...