Hey gang, and welcome to your first step in becoming a black belt in PHP and MySQL. Okay then, so first of all, I just want to address the elephant in the room: why am I creating this PHP course? Because undoubtedly, some people might be watching this, thinking, “Why are you doing this? Isn’t PHP a dead language?”
Well, let’s dive into it. PHP is like the Marmite of server-side languages; you either love it or you hate it, and it definitely splits opinions. But in my eyes, it’s still very, very worthwhile learning as a developer for a few reasons.
Why PHP?
Firstly, despite what anyone says about it, PHP is still extremely popular. WordPress, Magento, Drupal, WooCommerce, and many other content management systems and e-commerce platforms all still use PHP. Even big players like Facebook, Tumblr, and Slack rely on PHP. So, regardless of any kind of bad press it’s had over the years, PHP continues to thrive and is still a huge player on the web.
Secondly, it’s a very easy language for beginner web developers to pick up. It’s tightly coupled with HTML, making it a natural progression from front-end to back-end development. Plus, many web servers are pre-configured to run PHP, making it easy to get started and deploy websites.
Thirdly, there’s a huge and active community of support for PHP, which is invaluable for beginners and intermediate programmers alike. Despite some more experienced developers preferring other languages, PHP still sees widespread use, ensuring there’s always help available when you need it.
Finally, PHP makes up a large percentage of web developer jobs, making it a valuable addition to your academic tool belt.
About This Course
Now that we’ve addressed the why let’s talk about what PHP is and what you’ll learn from this course. PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (recursive, right?). It’s a server-side scripting language that allows us to create dynamic websites.
In this playlist, we’ll start off by setting up PHP on your computer and exploring the tools we’ll be using. Then, we’ll dive into the basics of PHP and creating PHP files. Once you’re comfortable with the basics, we’ll move on to rendering dynamic content in HTML templates, communicating with a MySQL database, handling sessions and cookies, and exploring object-oriented programming in PHP, including some of the newer PHP 7 features.
Project Preview
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to create projects like Ninja Pizza, a simple website where you can add, read, and delete pizzas. We’ll store pizza data in a MySQL database and interact with it using PHP.
Getting Started
For this course, I’ll be using Sublime Text as my text editor, but feel free to use whatever editor you’re comfortable with. All the course files can be found on the GitHub repo linked below, with separate branches for each lesson.
So, my friends, that’s your course introduction and your introduction to PHP. I hope you enjoy this playlist! If you like the videos, don’t forget to share, subscribe, and like. I’ll see you in the very next video as we embark on this PHP journey together!