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)

Databases

In the previous section, we saw how we can use PHP to manipulate and store data in files. But when an application relies on structured data, it gets pretty complicated using the filesystem, especially when the application grows, and so does your data. Imagine a social media website, with tons of relationships between the data, including post comments, interests, friendships, groups, and a plethora of other linked data. Also, as your application grows, scalability is an important factor. This is when you want to use a database, to be able to query the data in different ways – ordered, filtered, partial data, combined data (joined), and, at the same time, in a very performant way. A database management system (DBMS) is used for performing operations on database data (create, read, update, and delete). Also, since different types of data are related to other data types in a database, you may want accuracy, consistency, and reliability for your data storage. In this case...