Diving into PHP Part 1: Getting Started with PHP

[Joshuad]

Joshuad submitted a new Article:

Diving into PHP Part 1: Getting Started with PHP

Diving into PHP
Part 1: Getting Started with PHP

Introduction

Welcome to the 1st installment of Diving into PHP. This is a free online ebook or workshop written by Joshua Drake in an effort to teach those who are willing how to be a multifaceted web developer. As this is an individual project, it will take me a long time to reach completion, but I hope everyone will follow along and learn something. In this series, I will be jumping back and forth between languages (have no fear, I will remain highly organized with this) in an effort to demonstrate the best tools for the job in my opinion. Throughout this project, I will be supplying sample code to copy / paste, downloadable snippets, as well as demonstrations.

These articles will all be accessible to The Admin Zone community, my personal tutorial / resource site Drake Technologies, as well as Good-Tutorials.com and possibly others. If anyone has any questions, feel free to leave a comment. This is considered a 'workshop', so I'm expecting comments, concerns, questions, everything.

This particular article will serve as a crash course, teaching you how to install the software you will need to start with. With all of these articles, it is assumed that you have a basic knowledge of HTML, as these concepts will be very lightly demonstrated throughout. Within the course of this series of articles, expect to learn the following items right off the bat:

• Installing PHP / MySQL for testing purposes
• Inserting PHP snippets into HTML code
• Displaying text using PHP
• Commenting
• Basic Predefined functions
• Variables
• Concatenation
• Constants
• Operators
• Precedence
• Conditionals
• Loops
• and more...

This will be the easiest tutorial of the PHP part of the series. Just remember, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me. If anyone has any corrections or disputes with the information, feel free to comment as well. Now let’s get started!

Setting Up Your Environment

Apache / MySQL / PHP Setup

Some PHP books or guides will go over setting up a complete LAMP/WAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP or Windows/Apache/MySQL/PHP) setup, but I feel if you want a complete test environment this...

Read more about this article here...

 

[ncrs107]

Well written!

This tutorial is well written and includes enough screen shots to help a new user go right through the process. I look forward to future installments.

Well done!

 

[tbofram]

Thanks for that. I will recommend this thread too a friend.

 

[shovenose]

Oh man this is gonna be great!

Quick question: will xampp work on windows 7/xp and other non server oses?

 

[MarkR]

Great job Josh! I'm sure this will help many get started with the great language of PHP

 

[Valid]

Thanks, Josh can't wait till the next part really want to learn PHP

Oh man this is gonna be great!

Quick question: will xampp work on windows 7/xp and other non server oses?

xampp works on multiple OSes, look at there download page and download the one that works on your OS. Xampp Download page

 

[shovenose]

OK. Thank You. Any idea when Part 2 is coming?

 

[HIM]

Personally I prefer WAMP2 over XAMP.

I liked this Article, but I wish I could skip to 3 or 4 as this was very basic.

*sits here waiting*

 

[crushbunny]

Nice article Josh... Thank you..
Of course this is only the first step but it means a lot to a beginner...

Personally I prefer WAMP2 over XAMP.

Me too...

 

[Joshuad]

I could have sworn I set this thread to subscribe, and just thought no one was interested. I apologize for not responding in so long, and will be working to release the next installment within the next few weeks. :embarrassed:

 

[asadriaz]

i know basic programming in C. because of that, i can manage HTML syntax and basic rules. for PHP. i am zero. so are you going to start from zero? i just really wana learn PHP.

 

[Joshuad]

Yes, I will be starting from the very basics such as passing text from PHP through HTML, to even items as simple as commenting your applications. By the time I'm finished (dear god who knows when that will be as there's so much to cover), I should have covered up to some reasonably advanced topics.

 

[Elmer]

Very useful article, I wish I had something like this when I started into PHP. Thank you.

 

[Joshuad]

Trust me, me too. I must have read at least a dozen books before I got it. Would have helped a lot to have someone walk me through with examples of what I was learning.

 

[asadriaz]

i have already setup the xampp. control pannel is working well. server is up. just waiting for next step kinda excited

 

[rafalp]

Notepad is good if you need to make few quick edits to your code, but for working with hudge projects you can and should use NetBeans instead. Its free and its fantastic IDE that allows you to work with multiple languages.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Notepad is okay, but if you write a script on a Mac, and then view it on a PC, all the code will be on one or two lines. And I believe it's the same vice versa.

 

[Joshuad]

I'm not used to using ide's other than dreamweaver so I just used the first free one I saw with recommendations

 

[rafalp]

Notepad is okay, but if you write a script on a Mac, and then view it on a PC, all the code will be on one or two lines. And I believe it's the same vice versa.

In new document settings tell it to format documents Unix way, that should make newlines work on both Windows and Mac.

 

[Judge Dredd]

In new document settings tell it to format documents Unix way, that should make newlines work on both Windows and Mac.

Thanks! Ya learn something new everyday!