Introduction to PHP  
 
 

Week 1

Readings:
Hello and welcome to this PHP Minicourse. The goal of this course is to teach the web development language PHP along with some important tips for programming securely. The first couple of weeks will focus on simply learning the basics of the language, and after that the course will work more on creating small webpages and making sure they're secure. The files to be downloaded have been converted to txt. This way you will be able to read them without being forced to download them, as would be the case if they were zipped or something To "download" them, simply click on the link and copy the text, pasting it in a file and naming it as indicated. Anyone who is not familiar with simple HTML programming should review this HTML tutorial. The PHP reading for the first week is chapters 1 and 2 in Progamming PHP.

Key Concepts:
-Using simple HTML
-Setting up your PHP programming environment
-PHP basics

Exercises:
Decide where you're going to be doing your programming for the course. If you will be using the lab computer, talk to Mike Tie about getting access. If you'd rather work from your own computer, it is recommended that you set up a web server on your computer (such as Apache) from which you can host your webpages. You should be able to use any text editor you want for your actual code. The course creator (me) used a free editor called conTEXT. Once you're ready to go, create a couple of files: A header file with the html, title, and body tags and a footer file with the closing body and html tags. Then make 2 simple pages, one of which echoes "hello, world", and one that echoes something else. Include the header and footer files logically in both of your files and then put a link to both files in the footer file. Feel free to experiment with anything else that interests you!


Files to Be Downloaded