Learn PHP in One Day and Learn It Well for Beginner and its freee

 

Learn PHP in One Day and Learn It Well for Beginner and its freee

 

In This Blog we’ll be covering most of the major topics in PHP. These topics are carefully chosen to give you a broad exposure to PHP while not overwhelming you with unnecessary details.

Before we dive into PHP proper, note that this book requires you to have a basic understanding of HTML and MySQL.

 

What is PHP?

PHP is a general-purpose programming language used mostly for web development. Created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, it allows developers to create dynamic web pages with ease. For instance, developers can create a form in HTML and process it using PHP. Depending on the inputs entered into the form, developers can use PHP to display different outputs to users. Most of the time, PHP is used as a server-side language. This means that PHP code is not processed on the user’s computer (also known as a client). In other words, when you access a PHP page on your browser, the code is not processed on your computer. Instead, your browser sends a request to a web server, which then processes the code and returns the result to the browser in the form of a web page. More often than not, this web server is a remote computer where the PHP files are stored. For the web server to process PHP code, a special software known as the PHP interpreter needs to be installed. We’ll learn to set up our web server and install the PHP interpreter using a free software called XAMPP.

 

Why Learn PHP?

There are many reasons for learning PHP.

Firstly, PHP is one of the most widely used web programming languages and is used in many popular content management systems such as Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla.

As such, the demand for PHP programmers is high. If you plan on working as a freelance developer, PHP is an essential skill to have. Next, PHP is designed to be beginner-friendly and easy to learn. In addition, due to the popularity of the language, if you run into any issues with your PHP code, you can find help easily. A simple search on the internet will likely help you resolve most of the problems you face.

Last but not least, the syntax of PHP is very similar to other programming languages such as Java or C. Once you are familiar with PHP, you’ll find it much easier to master other languages. Ready to get started? Let’s do it!

 

Installing XAMPP

we’ll learn to set up our web server and install the PHP interpreter. In addition, as we’ll be using PHP to interact with a database later, we need to set up our database server too.

To set up our web and database servers, we need to install three software: the Apache web server, the PHP interpreter and the MarieDB database server.

Installing all three software can be tedious if we do them one by one. Fortunately, some kind folks at Apache Friends created a free package that contains all the software we need. This package is known as XAMPP, which stands for Cross-platform (X), Apache web server (A), MarieDB database server (M), PHP (P) and Perl (P).

The MarieDB database server is a community-developed fork of the MySQL server. Although M in XAMPP officially stands for MarieDB, you’ll see that XAMPP labels the database server as MySQL in the software. We’ll follow this label and refer to the database server as MySQL.

For detailed instructions on installing XAMPP and using it to set up our servers, check out servers, check out https://learncodingfast.com/how-to-install-xampp-and-brackets

Instructions are available on the accompanying site of this book so that whenever there are any changes to XAMPP, you can find the updated instructions on the site. This will ensure that you’ll always get the latest installation instructions.

Besides installing XAMPP, you are strongly encouraged to install an advanced text editor to do your coding in. While you can definitely code in a basic text editor (such as Notepad), an advanced text editor offers features like syntax highlighting that makes your code easier to read and debug.

A recommended free editor is Brackets. For instructions on installing Brackets, head over to https://learncodingfast.com/how-to-install-xampp-and-brackets  as well.

 

Configuring php.ini

After you have installed XAMPP and Brackets on your computer, you are ready to start creating your dynamic website.

However, before we do that, we need to make some changes to the error settings on our PHP server. This ensures that whenever there’s any mistake in our code, an error message will be displayed on the browser.

To configure these settings, the most direct way is to modify a file called php.ini. The instructions below are valid at the time of writing. If there are any changes to the instructions, you can find the updated instructions at https://learncodingfast.com/php .

To modify php.ini, we need to locate the file first.

To do that on Windows, launch XAMPP and click on the “Config“ button for Apache. Next, select php.ini. The file will be opened in Notepad.

On Mac, launch XAMPP and click on the “Start” button in the “General” tab.

Wait for the status to turn green. Next, select the “Volumes” tab and click on the “Mount” button. Finally, click on “Explore” and look for the “etc” folder.

You’ll find php.ini inside this folder. Open it using Brackets.

 

Once php.ini is open, scroll to the bottom of the page and add the following lines to it:

Error_reporting=E ALL

Display_error=on

These lines are added to the bottom of the page so that if the settings have been set previously (in earlier parts of the php.ini file), the new lines will override the previous settings.

Next, save the file and restart Apache. On Windows, just stop the Apache server (if it is currently running) and start it again. On Mac, select the “Services” tab and click on “Apache”. If Apache is currently running, click on the “Restart” button. Else, click on the “Start” button. Wait for Apache to restart and your settings will be updated.

You’ll now get an error message whenever there’s an error in your code. Depending on the PHP version you are using, some of the errors you encounter when testing the code

 

Important Links

Before proceeding to code our first web page, I would like to bring your attention to two important links. The first is https://learncodingfast.com/php .

This book uses lots of examples to illustrate different concepts. While you are encouraged to type out these examples in Brackets yourself, if you prefer not to, you can download the source code at the link above. The project files and any additional notes or updates to the book can also be found there.

Next, we have the errata page. While every effort has been made to ensure that there are no errors in the book and all source code has been tested extensively on multiple machines, if there are any errors we missed, you can find the errata at https://learncodingfast.com/errata .

 

 

Coding our first Web Page

Great! We are now ready to start coding. First, ensure that you have started Apache in XAMPP.

Note: If you have any problems starting Apache, it is likely due to a port conflict. Follow the instructions at https://learncodingfast.com/how-to-install-xampp-and-brackets  to resolve the conflict.

Next, create a new file in Brackets and add the following code to it:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

<title>My first PHP page</title>

</head>

<body>

<h1>My first PHP page</h1>

<?php

#Simple hello world page   echo "Hello World!";

?>

</body>

</html>

If you are using an ebook reader, some lines above may wrap to the next line due to the limited width of the reader. If that occurs, try changing your device to the landscape mode or using a smaller font size. The same applies to all the other examples in this book.

Save the file above as hello.php to your htdocs folder. Any file that contains PHP code must be saved with a .php extension. A file that ends with a .php extension is also known as a PHP script.

You can find the htdocs folder inside the XAMPP (Windows) or LAMPP (Mac) folder.

htdocs is the root directory of your local web server. On Windows, to load the files stored in htdocs, you simply type http://localhost/<filename> into your browser’s address bar. For instance, to load hello.php, type http://locahost/hello.php.

On Mac, the easiest way to load files stored in htdocs is to enable port forwarding. This can be done under the “Network” tab in XAMPP. Suppose you have enabled “localhost:8080->80(Over SSH)” in XAMPP, to load hello.php, type http://locahost:8080/hello.php into your browser’s address bar.

Got it? You can refer to https://learncodingfast.com/how-to-installxampp-and-brackets for more detailed instructions.

For ease of reference, from this point forward, I will use http://localhost to refer to your localhost. If you are using Mac, remember to add the port number to the URL (i.e., http://localhost:8080).

Let’s analyze the code in hello.php now. Most of the code should look familiar to you except the following:

<?php

#Simple hello world page    echo "Hello World!";

?>

The <?php … ?> tags above are known as PHP tags; they tell the server that code enclosed within should be treated as PHP code.

In our example, we have two simple lines of PHP code. The first line

#Simple hello world page

is known as a comment. Comments are written by programmers to explain their code to other programmers; these comments are ignored by the PHP interpreter.

To add a single line comment to our code, we precede the comment with # or //.

For instance,

# This is a comment

// This is also a comment

To add multiple lines comment, we enclose the comment in /*...*/.

For instance,

/*This is an example of a multi-line comment. */

After the comment, we use the statement

echo "Hello World!";

to display the words “Hello World!” on the browser. This is known as an echo statement; we’ll learn more about it in the next chapter.

Notice that we end the echo statement with a semicolon (;)? All statements in PHP must end with a semicolon. This is similar to how we end sentences with a period (.) in English.

If you load hello.php now, you’ll get

as the output.

That’s it. We have just coded our first PHP web page. Simple? Great!

Let’s move on.

Basic PHP Tasks

In the previous chapter, we installed XAMPP and Brackets and coded our first PHP script.

In this chapter, we’re going to learn to perform three very fundamental tasks in PHP - displaying outputs to users, duplicating code across multiple pages and redirecting users.

 

Displaying Outputs

Before we learn to display outputs, let’s create a PHP file to serve as a template for us to test the PHP statements in this section.

Create a file in Brackets and save it as output.php to your htdocs folder. Add the following code to output.php:

<?php

//Add code here

Whenever you want to test any PHP statement in this section, you can add the statement to output.php (after the <?php opening tag) and load it in your browser to check the output.

Notice that we did not add a closing tag (?>) to output.php? This is because output.php only contains PHP code.

According to the standard recommended by the PHP Framework Interop Group, any PHP script that only contains PHP code should not end with a closing tag. This is to prevent unwanted whitespaces at the end of the file, which can cause issues such as an “Headers already sent” warning when modifying response headers.

Do not worry if the statement above does not make any sense; we’ll learn about the “Headers already sent” warning later. For now, let’s move on to learn how to display outputs in PHP.

echo

The easiest way to display outputs in PHP is to use an echo statement. To do that, we enclose the text that we want to display in a pair of matching quotation marks after the echo keyword. The echo keyword is not case sensitive. Hence, echo, Echo or ECHO will all work.

Using an echo statement is straightforward. We did that in Chapter 2 when we used it to display the words “Hello World!”.

In addition to using echo statements to display simple text messages, we can use them to display text with HTML markup. For instance, we can write

echo 'PHP is fun<BR>and easy!';

This gives us

PHP is fun and easy!

as the output; the text “and easy!” is displayed on the second line due to the <BR> tag.

We can also combine multiple messages in a single echo statement. To do that, we separate the messages with commas. For instance,

echo "ABCD", "EFGH"; gives us

ABCDEFGH

as the output. Combining messages is useful when our message is more complex, such as when the message includes variables and functions. We’ll learn about variables and functions in later parts of the book.

Last but not least, we can use an echo statement with or without parentheses. You may have seen some code that does the following:

echo ("ABCD");

This is fine in most cases. However, if you use parentheses, you are not allowed to combine multiple messages in a single echo statement.

For instance,

echo ("ABCD", "EFGH");

will give us an error. In most cases, you are better off using echo statements without parentheses.

print

Besides using echo statements to display outputs, we can use print statements.

print statements are VERY similar to echo statements. Let’s look at an example:

print "My name is Brody."; gives us

My name is Brody.

as the output. As you can see, the print statement works just like an echo statement. While there are some differences between them, in most cases, there is no need to use the print statement.

In PHP, it is fairly common that there is more than one way to perform a certain task. This is one of the main complaints developers have about PHP, as it complicates things unnecessarily. In most cases, the different ways are very similar to each other. In order not to overwhelm you with too many options, I'll stick with one option in this book and briefly mention other options if necessary. In this book, I’ll be using echo statements to display outputs.

also read

https://u2suggestions.blogspot.com/2022/10/how-to-build-website-with-html-complete.html

back to topic

Escaping Characters

Next, let’s learn to escape characters in PHP.

In the previous sections, we learned to enclose text in quotation marks when we use an echo (or print) statement. What happens if we want to display an apostrophe?

For instance, suppose we have the following statement:

echo '<BR>Today is Friday, we're going to the zoo.';

We’ll get an error when we try to run the statement above as PHP does not differentiate between an apostrophe and a quotation mark by default. Hence, it treats the apostrophe in the word “we’re” as a closing quotation mark. In other words, it sees the statement as

echo '<BR>Today is Friday, we'

and expects a semicolon or comma after the apostrophe. When that does not happen, PHP gets confused and gives us an error.

There are two ways to deal with the error above. The first is to use double quotation marks to enclose the text and rewrite the statement as echo "<BR>Today is Friday, we're going to the zoo.";

As PHP uses a double quotation mark to close another double quotation mark, the apostrophe in “we’re” is not mistakenly interpreted as a closing quotation mark.

Alternatively, we can escape the apostrophe in the original statement by preceding it with a backslash character (\).

Escaping a character alters the meaning of the character. Without the backslash character, the apostrophe is interpreted as a closing single quote. With it, it is treated as an apostrophe meant to be displayed on the browser.

For instance, to display the apostrophe in the previous example, we can use the statement below:

echo '<BR>Today is Friday, we\'re going to the zoo.';

This gives us the following output:

Today is Friday, we're going to the zoo.

Other common uses of the backslash character include:

Using it to display a double quotation mark

echo """;

gives us an error, while

echo "\""; gives us

"

Using it to display the backslash character itself

echo "\";

gives us an error, while

echo "\\"; gives us

\

 

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