Introduction to PHP and MySQL

A new section of each course starts monthly. 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.

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 lessons are released. You will have access to all lessons until the course ends. However, the interactive discussion area that accompanies each lesson will automatically close two weeks after the lesson is released. As such, we strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final exam has been released, you will have two weeks to complete all of your course work, including the final exam.

Lesson 1

What Is PHP?

These days, people expect the information on professional websites 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. You'll begin by exploring the web application that you'll be building throughout the course—one that will result in a complete content management system that you can adapt for any future websites you create. You'll see how the PHP programming language presents dynamic data, and how the MySQL database server stores it. You'll also dive into the world of WAMP servers, the engine behind dynamic websites. Finally, you'll take a big (but easy) step forward by downloading and installing a WAMP server on your own computer.

Basic PHP Programming

Discover how to incorporate PHP programming into your web pages to dynamically produce content on your web pages. You'll see how to store data in variables, and use mathematical operators on data to write programs that can manipulate and display content on your web pages.

More PHP Programming Features

A key aspect of dynamic web applications is the ability to process data and make decisions based on the data. You'll examine some PHP statements that allow you to alter the content in your web pages based on data values in your PHP programs. You'll also learn some techniques for simplifying the programming process by using loops to handle multiple data elements, as well as how to include common code files in all your web pages.

Creating a MySQL Database

In this lesson you'll use the popular phpMyAdmin web-based tool to create database objects. You'll first examine how data is organized in a database, then you'll create the actual database and tables necessary for the course project data.

Creating a Dynamic Home Page

The core of the Recipe Center application is the web page template. In this lesson you'll walk through the HTML and CSS code required to display the dynamic content that your PHP code will generate.

Displaying Database Content Dynamically

In this lesson you'll dig into the nuts and bolts of dynamic web programming. You'll use PHP code to retrieve data from MySQL tables and display it on the Recipe Center web page. Now you can control what appears on the web page simply by changing data in the database!

Allowing Visitors to Enter Data

Allowing visitors to post information dynamically is a great feature to add to your website. In this lesson you'll see how to create HTML forms for entering data, then work on how to retrieve the data and insert it into the MySQL table using PHP code. This will make your website even more attractive to visitors!

Implementing a Simple Search Engine

This lesson walks through the basics of implementing a simple search engine in your dynamic web application. Providing the ability for visitors to quickly search and retrieve data stored in the database is a great feature to add to your site, and you'll see how to do that with just a few extra lines of PHP code and some SQL magic!

Producing Attractive Printer-Friendly Pages

Despite the efforts of web programming, the world hasn't quite gone paperless yet. Because of that, you'll need to provide a printer-friendly version of your web application so visitors can print information. In this lesson, you'll see two different ways to provide a printer-friendly way of displaying the dynamic content from the Recipe Center.

Controlling User Access

Restricting access to data on a website is a vital feature for many web administrators. This lesson shows how to use PHP to control access either to an entire website, or to just specific features on the website. This lets you control who can submit data to your site, helping to block the comment spam that often appears on blog sites.

Backing up and Restoring MySQL Data Files

Being able to restore data in a database is a crucial function in any dynamic website. This lesson demonstrates different methods of backing up and restoring data in the MySQL environment. You'll learn not only how recover data into an existing database, but also how to migrate data from one MySQL server to another.

Implementing Pagination

All websites that provide access to lots of data implement some way to page through the data. In this lesson, you'll implement a pagination algorithm that allows your site visitors to page through all of the data records in small chunks. This is one of those features you can add to help make your website look more professional.