PHP Tutorial (& MySQL) #1 - Why Learn PHP?

Key Takeaways

hey gang and welcome to your first step in becoming a black belt in PHP and my sequel 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 and I suppose 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 so first of all despite what anyone says about it it's still extremely popular WordPress Magento Drupal WooCommerce and many other content management systems and e-commerce platforms they all still use PHP and also other sites like Facebook Tumblr and slack they also use PHP as well so regardless of any kind of bad press it's had over the years PHP continues to thrive and it's still a huge player on the web now secondly it's a very very easy to pick up language for beginner web developers and it's tightly coupled with HTML as well which is one of the reasons I think it's so popular it was one of the first programming language that I started playing with many many moons ago when I jumped into web development and it just felt like a natural progression from front-end its back-end at the time because it was so easy to pick up and also a lot of web servers are pre-configured to run PHP so uploading a PHP site to the internet and getting it running is pretty easy as well so thirdly there's a huge and active community of support up there for PHP which is really helpful to beginners as well and intermediate programmers even if a lot more experienced developers don't like PHP as much as other languages a huge amount of them still use it because PHP makes up a large part of the web so they're always there to help and finally it does make up a large percentage of web developer jobs which makes it a very nice addition to your academic tool belt as well I'm also making this course because it's probably been the number one requested tutorial series I've had since starting this channel there's been a lot of you're messaging me and commenting saying can we have PHP tutorials all the time so that the way out of the way now let's talk about what PHP is and what you'll learn from this course so PHP is actually a recursive acronym it stands for PHP hypertext preprocessor so this recursive acronym it just means that PHP goes on and on in the acronym and that's a bit strange but fair play for making the acronym recursive not many technologies do that but essentially PHP is just a server-side scripting language that allows us to create dynamic websites now it runs on the server and not directly in a browser so I'm assuming you already understand how to make a static website with HTML CSS and maybe a bit of JavaScript as well if not be sure to check out those playlists I'll leave the link down below but anyway when you create a static HTML website with some CSS and JavaScript all of that HTML all of that CSS and JavaScript all of that code you write runs inside a web browser right here now PHP doesn't do that it runs on a server over here so for example we could visit a website URL in the browser and when we hit enter that sends a request to whatever server is hosting that website and it's here on the server that the PHP code will run now at this point in our PHP code we could compile a dynamic HTML template and then send that back to the browser which will then see in the browser ok now at some other point after we get that HTML page in the browser and we're browsing the web site we could fill in some kind of form and then submit that form now when we click that submit button it will send another request to the server and at this point on the server we could have some PHP code to take that data that our users typed in and save that to a database and then once we've done that we could send back another compiled HTML template like a success page to the browser so this is the general idea of using a server-side language like PHP to run code on the server which we couldn't always do direct make in a browser so we'll be learning how to do all of this and more in this playlist so we'll start off in the next video first of all by setting up PHP on our computer looking at a few other tools that we'll be using as well and after that we're going to dive right into the basics of PHP and how to create PHP files then when we get comfortable with all the basics we're going to look at how we can render dynamic content in our HTML templates using PHP then we'll look at how we can communicate with a my sequel database and save stuff in the database then retrieve it later on then we'll talk about sessions and cookies and all that kind of stuff and finally we'll have a look at objects and classes in PHP as well and maybe even a couple of the newer PHP 7 features as well so by the end of this course you should be able to make a project that looks a little bit like this so the website is called ninja pizza and it's basically just a simple little website where you can add new pizzas read about pizzas and delete pizzas because after all who doesn't like pizza ok so you can see right here we've got three pizzas listed they're all being stored in a database and my sequel database and we can see the name the ingredients we can click more informations to see who created it when it was created it and we can also delete them right here as well so if I say delete it's going to remove that from there I can add new pizzas as well so if I go to email I'll say Mario at the net Ninja code at UK and then the pizza title is going to be the mario supreme we're gonna add on tomato cheese and mushrooms click Submit and we'll see that right here as well ok so that's what we're going to be creating once we've learnt the basics of PHP as we go through this course now for this course I'm going to be using sublime text as my text editor for some reason whenever I start to use PHP I always go back to sublime text I guess it's because this is what I always used to use for PHP in the past so it could be a nostalgia thing but you're free to use whatever you want whether it's adam or vs code or sublime entirely up to you if you do want to download sublime text you can get it at sublime text dot-com now i'm also supplying all of the course files for this playlist you can find them at this github repo right here the link is gonna be down below now this is important I've done a separate branch for each lesson so if you want to see the code for a lesson I don't know 20 for example you need to go to the branch drop-down and select lesson 20 otherwise you won't see that code and the code is all here ok so there we go my friends that your course introduction and your introduction to PHP as well I really really hope you enjoy this playlist if you do like the videos my friends don't forget to share subscribe and like and I'm going to see you in the very next video [Music]