http://www.roughguidetophp.com An introductory tutorial to the world of PHP. Some more advanced subjects too Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:29:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en When developing a PHP project, whether it's a simple website or a much larger web application, it's always a good idea to take into account the potential appearance of errors in your PHP code. An error occurs whenever PHP tries to execute an instruction which either results in an ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/reporting-and-handling-errors-in-php/ So far throughout this tutorial, we've been looking at a method of programming called "procedural programming" in which program execution proceeds in a linear fashion, from start to finish and makes use of procedure calls. Procedures, which we've come to know as functions, allow us to execute arbitrary code segments ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/classes-and-object-oriented-programming-in-php/ One of the more surprising things you can learn about PHP is that it's actually very useful when it comes to manipulating images of varying filetypes and formats. And a good thing too, since a lot of the internet is made up of pictures! The functionality of PHP in terms of ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/php-image-manipulation-with-gd2/ Website design with PHP It's quite likely you've reached this page because you're interested in learning how to build your first website with PHP, or modify your existing website to make use of PHP. It's also quite likely, if you're just starting out with PHP, or programming in general, that you ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/an-introduction-to-php/ When developing more complex PHP sites, especially forums, discussion boards and blogs where date and time functions are important, you'll regularly encounter situations where you need to display and manipulate values based around the current date and time. PHP includes a range of functions which can help you to easily ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/working-with-dates-and-times-in-php/ Saving a PHP file A PHP file is basically a text file containing all the required PHP code to run a specific program. PHP code can be written with the use of a simple text editor, like Windows Notepad, or the more useful Crimson Editor. All you need to do ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/php-syntax/ Now it's time to get down to the real task at hand - actually creating a working web-page using PHP. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to create a simple web-page to demonstrate how to add a little bit of dynamic jazz to an otherwise static site. Mixing PHP with ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/adding-php-to-html-files/ Functions are arguably one of the most useful features of PHP. They allow a programmer to encapsulate sections of code within a structure which can then be executed from anywhere else in the program flow. Functions are instantiated by use of the function keyword, followed by the user-defined function name ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/functions-in-php/ Arrays There are times in programming where you need to keep track of many variables at once. Maybe the current time of day, the number of items in a package or the name of a certain product. These variables may all be very similar too though, you might, for example, need ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/arrays-in-php/ Variables are probably one of the most commonly used code constructs you'll come across while programming. If you have any experience of mathematics, especially algebra, you'll be aware of the concept of using symbols to represent unknown quantities in equations, like in the following example x + 5 = 7; from this ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/variables-in-php/ Conditional statements are used in PHP (and in any other programming language) when the programmer wishes to place a branch in the code, where a specific result will occur if, and only if, a set of conditions is matched. A real world example might be I will go to the cinema ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/conditional-statements-in-php/ Introduction to Loops Loops in PHP are very useful when you need to perform repetitions of the same code over and over again, or when you need to ensure that you iterate through all possible values of an array, for example. They come in a few different flavours, the most common ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/loops-in-php-while-and-for/ [JUMPTO] Regular expression are one of the most powerful features of PHP. They're also one of the most confusing and bewlidering if you're not familiar with their syntax. They can be used for a wide range of purposes, from validating user names to grabbing data from a website. In this article, ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/10-regular-expressions-you-just-cant-live-without-in-php/ When working with secure websites and applications, it's important to consider any areas where security could be compromised. The main area to focus on is usually the user authentication systems where the site decides whether a specific person should be granted access, usually based on a username-password combination. Especially when authenticating ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/generating-secure-salted-passwords-with-php/ (The files used in this tutorial are available to download here) Pagination Sometimes when working with a MySQL powered website in PHP, we'll come across situations where we have multiple records that we wish to display to the visitor. If there are many tens, hundreds or more of these results, we might ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/pagination-splitting-data-across-multiple-pages-with-mysql-and-php/ (Download all the files used in this tutorial here) Visitor Tracking and Analysis When running a website, whether it's a small personal homepage, or a large site for a company, it's useful to be able to know who is visiting your site, and what they're up to while they're there. If you ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/a-simple-ip-address-and-visitor-tracking-tool-with-php-mysql/ Queries in MySQL A query in MySQL is an expression which we can send to the database which returns a specific set of results based on the values and conditions we've set in the query string. In less technical terms, you can think of it as a statement which defines a ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/querying-information-from-mysql-tables-with-select/ In this tutorial I'm going to guide you through a method of database design which is invaluable when dealing with many different tables or just when dealing with a lot of data that you'd like to be able to keep organised without giving yourself too much of a headache. Up until ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/using-multiple-mysql-tables-with-unique-ids-joins-and-normalization/ Generating simple reports from a table For this tutorial, let's take a look at some tables which contain information about a group of 8 pupils at a school, and their respective test scores pupil_id pupil_name score 1 Alan 95 2 Billy 64 3 Craig 77 4 David 54 5 Edward 88 6 Fred 59 7 George 44 8 Harry 59 Here you can see a simple table of pupil names and their respective scores in a test. To load ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/generating-reports-using-mysqls-aggregate-functions-sum-max-min-and-more/ Now that we've got a simple understanding of how to perform SELECT, INSERT and UPDATE MySQL queries (and if not, have a quick review from the last couple of tutorials) we can now work on building ourselves a very simple PHP application to accept user data and save it into ... http://www.roughguidetophp.com/creating-a-simple-comments-and-login-system-using-mysql-and-php/