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)

HTTP Headers

Every HTTP request and response is sent with a number of headers that facilitate communication between the client and server or provide meta-information about itself. Some headers will be automatically generated for you as part of the client making the request, such as Host, User-Agent, or Content-Length. It is important to be familiar with the extra headers you might want to include when making a request, as they can give you some control over the response you receive or the headers that might even be required for the request to be accepted.

The first of these is the Accept header. It allows you to specify a comma-separated list of content types expressed as a MIME type, such as text/html or application/json, which will be used to negotiate with the server to determine a mutual response body so that the client can correctly parse the request. The client may provide multiple content types it will accept, and the server will select one and specify which content type...