Sklar D. - Learning PHP: A Gentle Introduction to the Webs Most Popular Language

This book is designed so that you start at the beginning and work through the chapters in order. For the most part, each chapter depends on material in the previous chapters. Chapters each end with exercises that test your understanding of the chapters content.

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The next five chapters give you a grounding in the fundamentals of PHP. Before you can write great literature, you need to learn a little grammar and some vocabulary. Thats what these chapters are for. (Dont worryyoull learn enough PHP grammar and vocabulary right away to start writing some short programs, if not great literature.)

shows you how to work with different kinds of data, such as pieces of text and numbers. This is important because the web pages that your PHP programs generate are just big pieces of text.

are what you use, for example, to display only those items in a product catalog that fall between two prices a user enters in a web form.

introduces arrays, which are collections of a bunch of individual numbers or pieces of text. Many frequent activities in PHP programs, such as processing submitted web form parameters or examining information pulled out of a database, involve using arrays.

As you write more complicated programs, youll find yourself wanting to repeat similar tasks. Functions, discussed in , help you reuse pieces of your programs.

shows how data and logic together are combined into objects. Objects are reusable bundles of code that help you structure your programs. Objects also allow you to integrate existing PHP add-ons and libraries into your code.

The next five chapters cover essential tasks in building a dynamic website: interacting with users, saving information, and interacting with other websites.

supplies details on working with web forms, which are the primary way that users interact with your website.

, your website can do user-specific things such as display sensitive information only to authorized people or tell someone how many new message board posts have been created since she last logged in.

In addition to a database, you might also need to work with data stored in files. explains to how read and write files from a PHP program.

Next, details how to keep track of your users. This includes using cookies for transient data, but also users logging in to accounts and tracking session data such as a shopping cart of products.

The last chapter in this section, , delves into how your PHP program can interact with other websites and web services. You can retrieve the contents of other web pages or web APIs to use in your programs. Similarly, you can use PHP to serve up not just regular web pages but API responses to other clients.