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)

File I/O Handling

Filesystem operations are some of the most important in programming. We can enumerate session data storage in PHP; user-uploaded files, generated report files, cached data, logs – all of them utilize the filesystem. Of course, there are many other alternatives for persistent storage, but knowing how to operate the filesystem in a language is especially important due to its availability. It is basically present anywhere and can be used immediately.

Working with the filesystem, sometimes, you might want to read or write into a file that is stored in a known location relative to the script file location. For example, for a script that is created in the /app/demo/ directory that wants to read files from source/ relative to its location (in other words, /app/demo/source/), it would be better to know the script location.

This is different to the current working directory, because you may run the script from other locations as well. For example, if the current...