Preface

There is no need to state how much weight web applications have in our lives. We use web applications to know what our friends are doing, to get the latest news about politics, to check the results of our favorite football team in a game, or graduate from an online university. And as you are holding this book, you already know that building these applications is not a job that only a selected group of geniuses can perform, and that it's rather the opposite.

There isn't only one way to build web applications; there are actually quite a lot of languages and technologies with the sole purpose of doing this. However, if there is one language that stands out from the rest, either historically or because it is extremely easy to use, it is PHP and all the tools of its ecosystem.

The Internet is full of resources that detail how to use PHP, so why bother reading this book? That's easy. We will not give you the full documentation of PHP as the official website does. Our goal is not that you get a PHP certification, but rather to teach you what you really need in order to build web applications by yourself. From the very beginning, we will use all the information provided in order to build applications, so you can note why each piece of information is useful.

However, we will not stop here. Not only will we show you what the language offers you, but also we will discuss the best approaches to writing code. You will learn all the techniques that any web developer has to master, from OOP and design patterns such as MVC, to testing. You will even work with the existing PHP frameworks that big and small companies use for their own projects.

In short, you will start a journey in which you will learn how to master web development rather than how to master a programming language. We hope you enjoy it.