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.
Chapter 1, Setting Up the Environment, will guide you through the installation of the different software needed.
Chapter 2, Web Applications with PHP, will be an introduction to what web applications are and how they work internally.
Chapter 3, Understanding PHP Basics, will go through the basic elements of the PHP language—from variables to control structures.
Chapter 4, Creating Clean Code with OOP, will describe how to develop web applications following the object-oriented programming paradigm.
Chapter 5, Using Databases, will explain how you can use MySQL databases in your applications.
Chapter 6, Adapting to MVC, will show how to apply the most famous web design pattern, MVC, to your applications.
Chapter 7, Testing Web Applications, will be an extensive introduction to unit testing with PHPUnit.
Chapter 8, Using Existing PHP Frameworks, will introduce you to existing PHP frameworks used by several companies and developers, such as Laravel and Silex.
Chapter 9, Building REST APIs, will explain what REST APIs are, how to use third-party ones, and how to build your own.
Chapter 10, Behavioral Testing, will introduce the concepts of continuous integration and behavioral testing with PHP and Behat.
In Chapter 1, Setting Up the Environment, we will go through the details of how to install PHP and the rest of tools that you need in order to go though the examples of this book. The only thing that you need to start reading is a computer with Windows, OS X, or Linux, and an Internet connection.
This book is for anyone who wishes to write web applications with PHP. You do not need to be a computer science graduate in order to understand it. In fact, we will assume that you have no knowledge at all of software development, neither with PHP nor with any other language. We will start from the very beginning so that everybody can follow the book.
Experienced readers can still take advantage of the book. You can quickly review the first chapter in order to discover the new features PHP 7 comes with, and then focus on the chapters that might interest you. You do not need to read the book from start to end, but instead keep it as a guide, in order to refresh specific topics whenever they are needed.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Now, create a myactions.js file with the following content."
A block of code is set as follows:
#special {
font-size: 30px;
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Your first app</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mystyle.css">
</head>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ sudo apt-get update
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on Next until the end of the installation wizard."
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