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)

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how you can use functions that are built into PHP to accomplish many tasks that would otherwise require you to write a lot of code to do the same thing much less quickly. You also learned various ways to write your own functions: with and without parameters, using default values or not, or even with varying amounts of parameters. You gained an understanding of functions that are pure and do not meddle with global scope versus functions that do have side effects, either because they pull variables from the global scope or receive parameters by reference and change them. You learned that you can call functions by their name or as callables stored in variables, anonymously or by name. Hopefully, you have got a taste of how flexible and powerful functions are and how they can help you to write robust code by enforcing strict types.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to combine constants, variables, and functions that belong together logically...