Introduction to PHP and MySQL
Learn
how to create an interactive Web site, allowing visitors to post and retrieve
information provided by you or your site's visitors. In this six-week online
course, you'll see how to create dynamic Web pages using the PHP programming
language and the MySQL database server.
During the course, you'll walk through the development of a complete content
management system Web application. You'll receive clear, step-by-step,
instructions demonstrating how to create a complete Web site capable of
dynamically displaying data from a MySQL database.
You'll discover how you can allow your site's visitors to add new information to
an online database, search through posted data, and create meaningful printed
reports. By the end of this course, you'll have plenty of useful code templates
that will help you create your very own dynamic, Web-based, content management
system.
To enroll in this course, click the Enroll Now button below:
Requirements:
A PHP and MySQL development environment. During the first lesson in the course, you will be walked through the process of installing WAMP5 software, which provides a full PHP and MySQL development environment. You can download WAMP5 for free from http://www.wampserver.com/en/. You will also need Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Vista (WAMP5 does not support either Windows 98 or Windows Me); Internet access; e-mail; and the and the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser. Note: Macintosh users will not be able to use the WAMP5 software, and must provide their own PHP and MySQL development environment. Prior HTML coding experience is helpful, but not required.
Syllabus:
All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two
lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do
not have to be present when the lesson is released, but you must complete each
lesson within two weeks of its release.
A new section of each course starts on the second or third Wednesday of each
month. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space
the start date for each course at least two months apart.
| Week One |
| Wednesday - Lesson 01 |
| These days, people expect the information on
professional Web sites to change continually and to remain up to
date—even up to the minute. In this lesson, you'll start learning how to
produce dynamic Web pages that can do just that. We'll begin exploring
the Web application we'll be building throughout the course—one that
will result in a complete content management system that you can adapt
for any future Web sites you create. You'll see how the PHP programming
language presents dynamic data, and how the MySQL database server stores
it. We'll also dive into the world of WAMP servers, the engine behind
dynamic Web sites. Finally, you'll take a big (but easy) step forward by
downloading and installing a WAMP server on your own computer. |
| Friday - Lesson 02 |
| PHP has taken the Web by storm, and there are now
literally thousands of sites that use it to give visitors a dynamic
experience. Today, we'll look behind the curtain of these Web sites so
you can see how you can use PHP in your own applications. We'll examine
the basic structure of the language, and you'll discover how easy it is
to start programming with it. |
| Week Two |
| Wednesday - Lesson 03 |
| The core of any dynamic Web site is its database
engine. The WAMP server we're working with uses the popular MySQL
database server to store data. In this lesson, you'll find out how to
work with it to provide the content for your application. We'll examine
what database elements are required to store and access data, and then
we'll implement them using the graphical phpMyAdmin program. You'll
learn how to create databases, data tables, and a user account. |
| Friday - Lesson 04 |
| Throughout this course, we'll be creating a dynamic
Recipe Center Web application. It will allow visitors to post new
recipes as well as view existing recipes and post comments about them.
This will be a fun, interactive way to learn how to use PHP and MySQL.
It will also result in a template you can use to build any other dynamic
Web applications you want. Today, we'll look at the elements you'll need
for the Recipe Center application, and we'll map out a strategy for
creating the final product. We'll start by building the center of the
application—the home page. From there, your visitors will be able to
view a list of recipes, see the latest site news, and navigate to all of
the site's other sections. |
| Week Three |
| Wednesday - Lesson 05 |
| In this lesson, using your newfound PHP programming
skills and your newly created MySQL database, we'll actually start
displaying recipes in the Recipe Center application. You'll see how
PHP-included files can help keep your programming code simple. And
you'll find out how PHP can help you create dynamic links on your Web
pages—links that change along with the data on the pages. |
| Friday - Lesson 06 |
| From simple guest books to complicated interactive
discussion areas, allowing visitors to post data on a Web site has
become commonplace. Today, you'll see how PHP can extract data from
simple HTML forms and store it in your MySQL database. Then we'll use
this feature to allow visitors to post comments and new recipes in the
Recipe Center application. |
| Week Four |
| Wednesday - Lesson 07 |
| These days, users expect Web sites to provide
data-searching features. So in this lesson, we'll focus on incorporating
searching into the Recipe Center application. We'll examine some common
searching algorithms, and we'll go over the SQL tricks and PHP coding
you'll need to know to implement them. |
| Friday - Lesson 08 |
| While some people would like to live in a paperless
society, many still find it necessary to print everything. But trying to
print data from a dynamic Web site is often challenging. Fortunately,
today you'll discover what you can do to make printing simpler for your
Web site visitors. We'll go over two different techniques you can
incorporate into your Web applications to let visitors print exactly
what they need. Then we'll implement both of them into the Recipe Center
application so you can see them in action. |
| Week Five |
| Wednesday - Lesson 09 |
| Just saying the word security can send Web
administrators into a frenzy. But any dynamic Web site that allows
visitors to post data needs to have some level of security. In this
lesson, we'll look at what you can do to protect your Recipe Center
application from vandals and comment spammers. You'll see how to use PHP
to control who can post items, and we'll create a log-in system for the
application that tracks logged-in visitors as they request services. |
| Friday - Lesson 10 |
| Unfortunately, bad things can happen to data that's
on the Web, and it's your job to be prepared for the worst. Today, we'll
walk through the options for protecting your data from a catastrophe.
We'll discuss how to use data backups to help minimize any data loss,
and you'll see how to backup the MySQL server data to safely store
information in case your server crashes. Finally, we'll look at how to
use the simple phpMyAdmin utility to export your data at a moment's
notice—even while your visitors are still busily working away in the
application. |
| Week Six |
| Wednesday - Lesson 11 |
| Sometimes you can have too much data on a Web page.
There's nothing worse than dumping thousands of data records onto your
users' screens and making them sort through all of it. In this lesson,
you'll learn about a user-friendly way to handle massive amounts of
data. It's called paging, and commercial search engines like Google and
Yahoo popularized it. We'll take a peek at how they use paging, and then
we'll apply their techniques to the Recipe Center application. |
| Friday - Lesson 12 |
| One problem with dynamic Web pages is that there are
lots of code files to keep track of. For a large application, you can
easily lose track of which files have been modified or which versions of
files are active. In our final lesson, you'll learn how to organize your
PHP programming environment using software version control packages.
We'll walk through the process of using a simple version control system
to manage the Recipe Center application files. You'll see how easy it is
to implement code management in your project and the benefits of taking
a few extra minutes to do so. Finally, we'll focus on some important
files you should know about when you're running your own WAMP server.
You'll discover how to keep track of who's using your Web server and how
to spot errors and hackers. |
To enroll in this course, click the Enroll Now button below:
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