• View
• Edit
• History
• Print

Welcome to An Introduction to PHP.

Lecture 1, Welcome to An Introduction to PHP. February 19..

 This session  will Open with the following items:

• A personal introduction by your lecturer
• What is expected of you as a student
• an outline of the course
• Why certain things are omited and what you can do to explore them in your own time.

we will then have a round-table discussion of background and personal objectives. Each student will speak on their background, previous experience, interests, and what they want out of the course. We recognise that some students will be unused to joining in, but communication is a vital part of the two-way process of learning. Students don't have to speak at length but they must interact.

There will be no practical work involved this week. The remainder of the lecture will consist of:

• A history of, and introduction to, PHP
• A discussion of PHP, HTMl, the server and the web browser and how they all interact together to produce rich, interactive web pages
• The types of information PHP can handle, and how they are represented within the language
• The software we are going to be using for this course. These concluding sections are open to discussion as students are encouraged to use operating systems and platforms of their choosing. The next lecture will involve server setup for windows users, who will be the majority, but there will also be time to discuss other platforms and arrangements.
• We will also discuss text editors, file managers and server synchronization software. Some students will already be established with this, some will want to try different combinations and change as they go, and some will be starting afresh and all viewpoints and levels will be catered for. Not all of these topics will be immediately relevant but they will all be useful as you develop your PHP skills.

Assignment for lecture 1.

Out-of-class assignments for much of this course will require the submission of PHP code, which will mean emailing attachments. To get into the idea, please fill in and email Assignment 1. As mentioned in the section on student expectations, you must either be in touch with a submitted assignment or a reason for the lack thereof before the start of the next lecture. Your performance in this regard will be noted, and you will receive personal feedback at the end of the course.

A Note About Resource Materials And Documentation

I will not require you to purchase any texts for this course, and we will take the majority of our material from the PHP manual itself, which can be found at the following URL: http://php.net/manual/en/

We will also take some material, specifically on code style, from a text called "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship," which is available on Kindle should you wish to purchase it. Relevant portions are added to lecture notes where appropriate.

There are also several good books on PHP, should you find that it is easier for you to learn from a text rather than the language-specific manual itself. Don't worry, this is fine. People learn in different ways, and software manuals can be very dry material, and will often contain inside jokes from the developer communities who wrote them, although we try to keep that to a minimum.

Go back to the course overview page