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 order to understand the Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) approach, we should start by discussing the procedural-oriented programming approach first. The procedural approach is the conventional way of writing code in high-level languages where a problem is considered a sequence of things to be performed, such as walking, eating, reading, and so on. A number of functions can be written to accomplish such tasks. The procedural approach organizes a set of computer instructions into groups called procedures – also known as functions. Therefore, functions are first-class citizens in your code. When we focus that much on functions, consequently, the data gets less attention.

In a multi-function program, despite the fact that functions can house local data, a lot of important data is defined as global data. Several functions might operate on such global data and, therefore, the data might become vulnerable. Also, such an approach might not establish a secure way...