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)

Dependency Management

You may be asking yourself why we need the complexity of another tool to manage our external dependencies for us. You could always just grab a copy of the source code and put it directly in your project. The answer is made apparent by one word in the question: external. The dependencies are not your code, and you don't want to be responsible for managing them. This becomes even more apparent as you consider that those packages are likely to also depend on other libraries, which may still have dependencies themselves, and so on. This is further complicated by the fact that each of these libraries needs to be compatible with each other over time as they implement new features, bug fixes, and security maintenance releases.

Composer does all the hard work of determining whether any of the libraries you depend on have upgrades available and determining which versions of those libraries are compatible with each other, and generates a verbose list of packages...