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)

Namespaces

As the name suggests, a namespace provides naming and scoping, therefore, a namespace is another way of encapsulating items. We can call a named scope, a namespace can house related constants, functions, classes, abstract classes, traits, and interfaces in a group with a name, and they can be accessed using the name.

As an analogy, consider the naming of people. People are given unique names in a family in order to identify them and call them by. Beyond family, what if there are two people with the same name? There could be one John Doe in the computer science department and another John Doe in the electrical department. Coincidentally, they end up in the varsity's football team, so they can be called John Doe of computer science and John Doe of the electrical department. Surely, the team doesn't want to pass the football to the wrong John Doe.

The same goes for computer filesystems: there are directories and subdirectories. Inside a directory, there could...