In this lesson, we will introduce you to PHP and show you how it works. You will also be able to write your first PHP script after learning the basic syntax of PHP.
Up to this point, we have dealt only with variables that store single values, called scalar variables. In this lesson, we will be covering arrays. Arrays are variables that store sets of values.
Writing reusable code results in time and money savings, more consistent and bug free code, and the ability to hide complex code from less seasoned developers.
Regular expressions are used to do sophisticated pattern matching. PHP supports two types of regular expressions: POSIX and Perl. The Perl style is more powerful and much more common, so we'll cover these in this class.
In the lesson on authenticaion, we created a login form and learned to authenticate users by comparing their emails and passwords to records in a database. In this lesson, we will use session variables to remember that the users are logged in as they go from page to page and we will use cookies to make it easier for users to log in on future visits.
Most Web applications use databases to store large amounts of data. However, in some cases, it will be necessary to store data in or access data from files.