I am glad to announce about “PHP Fundamentals”, a new course I have developed few months ago and recently completed to refine its slides and assignments. This course is available for free at www.abelski.com.
This new course overviews the basic topics in PHP and reflects a practical approach for learning this language.
If you are already familiar with an object oriented programming language or even with a procedural one you will find PHP very easy to learn. If you are new to software programming I recommend you to start with the following introductory courses (in this order):
Introduction to Procedural Programming
Introduction to Object Oriented Programming
These two courses as well as ‘PHP Fundamentals’ are available for free at www.abelski.com.
The ‘PHP Fundamentals’ course covers the following topics:
Introduction to PHP
PHP Basics
Functions
Arrays
Strings
Regular Expressions
Web Forms
HTTP Headers
Sessions Management
Object Oriented Programming
Exceptions Handling
Reflection Capabilities
Databases Connectivity
The Standard PHP Library
Accessing Files
Networking
Each one of these links leads to the relevant slides presentation the ‘PHP Fudamentals’ course includes. In addition to these slides browsing at www.abelski.com you can find this course’s other relevant resources such as forums, chats, assignments and relevant links for other websites on the web.
The following topics were taken out of this course. Separated courses will be developed for each one of them:
PHP & Web Services
PHP Design Patterns
PHP Zend Framework
PHP Security
If you are doing your first steps learning PHP I strongly recommend you the following steps:
Download and install Xampp on your PC
Xampp is an open source one installation that puts on your PC apache server, PHP engine, MySQL database and few more applications (such as PHP My Admin to control MySQL database) that assists developing and running PHP scripts on your PC. You can download Xampp (for free) at www.xampp.org.
PHP Code Editor
Though you can find more than a few open source PHP code editors as well as advanced IDEs that support PHP development (e.g. Netbeans, Eclipse etc…) I recommend you to start with a simple notepad (or a similar more advanced text editor as TextPad).
Introductory Courses
If you are new to programming (as I stated above) I recommend you to start with the following two courses:
Introduction to Procedural Programming
Introduction to Object Oriented Programming
You can both of them available for free at www.abelski.com. Once completing the ‘Introduction to Procedural Programming’ course you can move forward and start the ‘PHP Fundamentals’ course. You can wait with taking the ‘Introduction to Object Oriented Programming’ course till you reach the ‘Object Oriented Programming’ topic in ‘PHP Fundamentals’ course.
Online Detailed Documentation
Before you start going over the material available at ‘PHP Fundamentals’ course I recommend you to start with paying a visit at www.php.net, where you can find detailed documentaion and code samples for most topics.
PHP Fundamentals Step by Step
I recommend you going over the first topics step by step ensuring you acquire ‘in depth’ understanding of each one of them. Many of the sub topics presented in these topics become highly relevant for understanding the more advanced topics of this course.
PHP Fundamentals Forums
Please note the forums and the chats available within the PHP Fundamentals course at www.abelski.com. Should you encounter any difficulty please don’t hesitate and place your questions in these forums.
Working on this course I did my best covering the required topics for passing the Zend Certified Engineer certification exam. Doing so I should mention the additional future planned PHP courses which are also relevant for this certification.
Thanks for reading this post. Please don’t hesitate and let me know your thoughs, feedback and any ideas for improving this course.
Sincerely yours,
Haim.
