PHP Free Tutorial

Lesson 1: PHP Basics

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.

Lesson 2: Flow Control

In this lesson you will learn about flow control in PHP with if-elseif-else conditions and with loops.

Lesson 3: Arrays

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.

Lesson 4: PHP and HTML Forms

In this lesson, you will learn how to process form data in PHP.

Lesson 5: String Manipulation

In this lesson, you will learn how to format strings and work with functions to manipulate them. You will also learn the benefits and dangers of magic quotes.

Lesson 6: Reusing Code and Writing Functions

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.

Lesson 7: Managing Data

In this lesson, you will learn how to access a database in PHP.

Lesson 8: MDB2

PEAR supplies a number of open source extensions to PHP including the MDB2 package, which provides a database abstraction layer, so that the PHP programmer doesn't have to worry about all the APIs for different databases.

Lesson 9: Authentication with PHP and SQL

In this lesson, you will learn the basic concept of authentication with PHP.

Lesson 10: Regular Expressions

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.

Lesson 11: Session Control and Cookies

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.

Lesson 12: Sending Email with PHP

In this lesson, you will learn how to send emails with PHP using both the built-in mail() function and the PHPMailer extension.

Lesson 13: File System Management

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.