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 to Built-In Functions

PHP comes with many built-in functions, such as strtoupper, which changes the case of an input string to uppercase:

echo strtoupper('Foo');
// output: FOO

PHP natively comes with a ton of functions. By adding extensions to PHP, you add even more built-in functions and classes to it. Built-in functions are precompiled in C as this is the language that PHP and its extensions are written in.

Note

How to add an extension will differ depending on which operating system you are on. So, when searching for it, always add the name of your operating system to your search and be sure to consult the most recent results first, as they are more likely to outline the correct procedure for installing or compiling extensions into PHP.

There is hardly anything more frustrating than spending days on writing some functionality, only to discover toward the end that there is a built-in function that does the same thing five times faster. So, before...