J223b: PHP Programming - 3 days

Who Should Attend:
Web designers and programmers, software engineers, systems analysts, applications programmers, computer science students, and anyone who is interested in using PHP to implement e-commerce. Participants who are interested in HTML form parsing, and who wish to understand how web servers function and how to extend their functionality with CGI and ISAPI. This module is also relevant to participants interested in implementing internet shopping carts, and processing secure, economical high-performance financial transactions.

Prerequisites:

Some knowledge of web and browsers, and basic programming experience with scripting languages like Perl are recommended.

Objectives:

PHP is a free, open-sourced scripting language that helps users create dynamic web pages with or without database integration. In addition to being available to new developments, it has the added advantage of being better supported, and has therefore been increasingly adopted by developers and other users.

This module is aimed at participants who have no previous PHP programming experience and wish to take advantage of this fully developed, server-side embedded scripting language to develop web applications.

Contents:

An Introduction to PHP: Characteristics of PHP; User Affirmations; Downloading PHP/Apache; Installation and Configuration.

Variables and Data Types: Integer, Floating-Point, String, Arrays, Boolean, Identifiers, Variables, Type Casting, Variable Assignment, Predefined Variables, Constants, Expressions

Operators and Control Structures: Expressions, Control Structures, Function Definition and Invocation, Nested and Recursive Functions, Building Function Libraries.

File I/O and the File System: Opening and Closing I/O, File I/O, Opening a Process File Pointer with popen(), Opening a Socket Connection, Displaying and Modifying File Characteristics, File Deletion, Copying and Renaming.

Strings and Regular Expressions: PHP's Regexp Functions (POSIX Extended), Regular Expression Syntax (Perl Style) , PHP's Regexp Functions (Perl Compatible).

Databases: What is SQL? PHP's Extensive Database Support; MySQL; PHP's Predefined MySQL Functions; ODBC.

PHP & XML: Markup, XML Syntax.

Component Support: JavaScript, The Component Object Model (COM)

Security: Configuration and Coding Issues, Data Encryption, E-Commerce Functions and User Authentication.