PHP Course

PHP is the language that quietly runs a huge share of the web — WordPress, Wikipedia, and Facebook's early years were all built on it. Unlike the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the other courses here, PHP code never reaches a visitor's browser at all: it runs on the server, and only the finished HTML gets sent out. This course covers PHP from that first mental shift through to talking to a real database.

What you'll learn

You'll start with the basics — variables, strings, conditionals, loops, arrays — the same building blocks every language has, just with PHP's particular quirks and conventions. From there the course moves into what PHP is actually for on a day-to-day basis: reading data a visitor submitted through a form, storing information in a database safely, and remembering who someone is from one page load to the next.

Because PHP only does anything once a server runs it, the examples in this course aren't live editors like the ones in the HTML or JavaScript courses. Each one shows real PHP code alongside the exact output it produces, whether that's a line printed to a terminal or text rendered onto a page — so you can read them closely, then copy them into your own .php files and run them for real.

Lessons

  1. Introduction
  2. Variables & Data Types
  3. Strings
  4. Operators
  5. Conditionals
  6. Loops
  7. Arrays
  8. Associative Arrays
  9. Functions
  10. Forms & Superglobals
  11. MySQL & PDO
  12. Sessions & Cookies
Where to start: begin with Introduction and go in order — later lessons (especially forms, MySQL, and sessions) lean on the arrays and functions covered earlier, so skipping around will leave gaps.