PHP 101 (part 15): No News is Good News
by Vikram Vaswani |
4 comments | Saturday, June 4, 2005
After the workout I gave you last time, you’re probably either chomping at the bit to build another PHP application or you’ve decided to give up PHP programming and try growing cucumbers instead. If it’s the latter, you should stop reading right now, because I can guarantee you that this concluding installment of PHP 101 has absolutely nothing to teach you about vegetable farming.
PHP 101 (part 14): Going to the Polls - Part 1
by Vikram Vaswani |
4 comments | Tuesday, March 8, 2005
In the course of this series, I’ve taken you on a tour of PHP, teaching you everything you need to know to get started with this extremely powerful toolkit. You’ve learned how to process arrays, write functions, construct objects, and throw exceptions. You’ve also learned how to read user input from forms, search databases, and use cookies and sessions to maintain state. You’re no longer the timid PHP newbie you used to be, but a bold and powerful PHP warrior, ready to take on anything the world (or your boss) throws at you…
PHP 101 (part 13): The Trashman Cometh - Part 1
by Vikram Vaswani |
1 comment | Sunday, February 27, 2005
Maybe you’ve heard the term GIGO before. If you haven’t, it stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out, and it’s a basic fact of computer programming: if you feed your program bad input, you’re almost certainly going to get bad output. And no matter which way you cut it, bad output is not a Good Thing for a programmer who wants to get noticed.
PHP 101 (part 12): Bugging Out - Part 1
by Vikram Vaswani |
1 comment | Sunday, January 30, 2005
Even the best developers make mistakes sometimes. That’s why most programming languages – including PHP – come with built-in capabilities to catch errors and take remedial action. This action can be as simple as displaying an error message, or as complex as sending the site administrator an email with a complete stack trace. To make it easier to do this, PHP comes with a full-featured error handling API that can be used to trap and resolve errors. In addition to deciding which types of errors a user sees, you can also replace the built-in error handling mechanism with your own custom (and usually more creative) functions. If you’re using PHP 5, you get a bonus: a spanking-new exception model, which lets you wrap your code in Java-like try-catch() blocks for more efficient error handling. In this edition of PHP 101, I’m going to discuss all these things, giving you a crash course in how to add error-handling to your PHP application. Keep reading – this is pretty cool stuff!
PHP 101 (part 10): A Session In The Cookie Jar
by Vikram Vaswani |
8 comments | Sunday, October 3, 2004
Now that you’ve used PHP with MySQL and SQLite, you probably think you know everything you need to get started with PHP programming. In fact, you might even be thinking of cutting down your visits to Zend.com altogether, giving up this series for something flashier and cooler… PHP 101 (part 10): A Session In The Cookie JarUh-uh. Big mistake.
PHP 101 (part 11): Sinfully Simple
by Vikram Vaswani |
6 comments | Sunday, October 3, 2004
Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last few years, you’ve heard about XML – it’s the toolkit that more and more Web publishers are switching to for content markup. You may even have seen an XML document in action, complete with user-defined tags and markup, and you might have wondered how on earth one converts that tangled mess of code into human-readable content. The answer is, not easily.
PHP 101 (part 9): SQLite My Fire! - Part 1
by Vikram Vaswani |
2 comments | Thursday, September 16, 2004
If you’ve been paying attention, you now know how to use PHP’s MySQL API to perform queries and process result sets. You might even have started thinking about how to re-program your site to run off a MySQL database. All of this is a Good Thing – it means you’re getting comfortable with using PHP’s database support to power your applications – but there’s still a little further to go.
PHP 101 (part 8): Databases and Other Animals - Part 1
by Vikram Vaswani |
29 comments | Tuesday, August 31, 2004
One of the most compelling things PHP has going for it is its support for a variety of database management systems, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and Microsoft Access. By virtue of this support, PHP developers can create sophisticated data-driven Web applications at a fraction of the time and cost required by competing alternatives. And nowhere is this more clear than in PHP’s longtime support of MySQL, the very fast, very reliable and very feature-rich open-source RDBMS.
PHP 101 (part 6): Functionally Yours
by Vikram Vaswani |
8 comments | Saturday, August 7, 2004
If you’ve been taking your regular dose of PHP 101, you know now enough about PHP to write simple programs of your own. However, these programs will be “procedural” or linear – the statements in them will be executed sequentially, one after another – simply because that’s the only programming style I’ve used so far. You know what they say about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing… as your PHP scripts become more and more complex, it’s only a matter of time before you bump your head against the constraints of the procedural method, and begin looking for a more efficient way of structuring your PHP programs.
PHP 101 (part 7): The Bear Necessities
by Vikram Vaswani |
15 comments | Saturday, August 7, 2004
So now you know how to create your own functions in PHP, and you’ve spent the last few days busily inspecting your applications and turning repeated code fragments into functions. But functions are just the tip of the software abstraction iceberg. Lurking underneath is a three-letter acronym that strikes fear into the hearts of most newbie programmers. OOP.
