The Web as Two-Way Street

Hi! This page is intended for students who attended my class called The web as a two-way street at cSplash this year (2007) or anyone else who wants learn a little PHP.

Orientation

PHP stands for "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor". It is a scripting language that is useful for making dynamic webpages, collecting information from visitors, storing information to databases and files, etc. I think it's a good language to know because it's easy to learn and you can embed HTML in your code, so it's perfect for making webpages.

Topics Covered

Programming primer -- we looked at variables, arrays of variables, for loops, and created a short program that computed the first 10 numbers in the Fibonacci sequence

HTML Forms -- We looked at HTML forms and the control elements (e.g. buttons, textboxes, radio buttons) that they contain

GET, POST & SESSION -- We looked at the three built-in variables PHP uses to retrieve information from user machines. These were called GET, POST, and SESSION.

The scripts we looked at in class:

  1. script1.php (or look at the code)
  2. script2.php (code)

Some scripts we didn't get to:

  1. simpleform.php (code)
  2. order.php (code)

Helpful PHP and HTML References

  1. PHP Manual (excellent resource)
  2. If you don't know anything about HTML
  3. Helpful details about the <FORM> tag

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