A very good presentation that has been used by a couple presenters of the SDPHP group, including myself. Takes you from the very basics of PHP to more advanced ideas like OOP.

1. INTRODUCTION TO PHP
SDPHP
Twitter: @sdphp | www.sdphp.org (coming soon)
MeetUp: www.meetup.com/SanDiegoPHP/

2. Who we are:
Presenters
John Congdon - Senior Web Developer at Networx Online
Twitter: @johncongdon
Email: john@sdphp.org
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/johncongdon
Eric Van Johnson - Systems Architect at AMCO International Education Services, Inc.
Twitter: @shocm
Email: eric@sdphp.org
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/vanjohnson
San Diego PHP User Group
San Diego PHP Meetups => http://www.meetup.com/SanDiegoPHP/
Facebook => https://www.facebook.com/groups/SanDiegoPUG/
IRC => freenode.net #sdphp
Twitter => @sdphp

3. A quick history
Created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf and was a set of simple Common Gateway
Interface (CGI) binaries written in the C programming language that he used for
tracking visits to his online resume, he named the suite of scripts "Personal Home
Page Tools"
In 1998 PHP 3.0 is announced and is a complete rewrite of the platform. By this
time Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski of Tel Aviv, Israel join Rasmus to
collaborate on the new implementation. This is also when PHP got it's official
name PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, which is a recursive acronym.

4. A quick history (cont.)
PHP 4 is released in 2000 sporting a new engine dubbed 'Zend Engine'
(comprised of the first names of Zeev and Andi). PHP 4.0 introduces a wide range
of additional new features. In addition to the highly improved performance it also
included key features such as support for many more web servers, HTTP
sessions, output buffering, more secure ways of handling user input and several
new language constructs.
There are companies that still use PHP 4.x in their production environment. (And
we like to make fun of them)
PHP 5 released in 2004 powered by Zend Engine II with a new object mode.
Current stable version of PHP is 5.4.8. Several new features come packed in the
current releases of PHP such as Namespace support, Native JSON support, and
security improvements.

5. Who uses PHP?
EVERYONE!
Google / Yahoo / Facebook / Sony /
Bank of America / NYSE / AT&T /
Blah Blah Blah Blah

6. OPEN & CLOSING TAGS

7. VARIABLES
A Variable, as the name suggests, can have its
value change during the execution of a script.

8. CONSTANTS
A constant, once defined, cannot be changed
or unset. Traditionally constants are uppercase.

9. INCLUDE FILE.. ONCE
Useful for class and function loading

10. INCLUDING MISSING SCRIPTS

11. TYPES IN PHP
● Strings
● Integers
● Floats
● Arrays
● and many more...

12. STRINGS
What's the difference?

13. INTEGERS

14. ARRAYS
Arrays are zero-based.
Arrays can be of mixed types

15. ASSOCIATIVE ARRAYS
Key => Value pairs of data

16. FLOW CONTROL

17. FOR LOOPS

18. FOREACH LOOPS

19. FOREACH LOOPS

20. WHILE LOOPS

21. DO WHILE

22. SWITCH CASES

23. CONTINUE AND BREAK
● for
● foreach
● while
● do ... while
● switch

24. ALTERNATE SYNTAXES

25. ALTERNATE SYNTAX: IF

26. ALTERNATE SYNTAX: FOR

27. ALTERNATE SYNTAX: FOREACH
ALTERNATE SYNTAX: WHILE

28. FUNCTIONS

29. CLASSES

30. MAGIC: GET

31. MAGIC: GET

32. MAGIC: SET

33. STATIC

34. CLASS CONSTANTS

35. CLASS VISIBILITY

36. METHOD OVERLOADING

37. DATABASE ACCESS
Why you should be using PDO (PHP Data Objects)
● Cross Database Driver support
● Prepared Statements
● Proper bindings
● and lots lots more

38. MODELS, VIEWS, CONTROLLERS
● Code Separation
● Reusability
● Ease Refactoring

39. MODELS
● a model represents your data
● Logical container for
○ Database calls
○ API Access
● Models usually represent
○ Tables in a database
○ a file or collection of files on a hard drive
○ Documents stored in Mongo
○ Any other data containers you need to define

40. VIEWS

41. VIEW.. MODELS?

42. CONTROLLERS

43. Other Cool Things PHP Can Do That
Not a Lot of People Know.
● PHP CLI - PHP files don't have to be web
pages. PHP is a very powerful language that
can be used from the command line to
perform a wide range of system task.
● As of PHP 5.4.0, the CLI SAPI provides a
built-in web server.
$ cd ~/public_html
$ php -S localhost:8000

44. Other Cool Things (cont)
● As of PHP 5.1.0, the CLI SAPI provides an
interactive shell using the -a option.

45. PHP Tools
● Text Editor (Notepad / Notepad ++)
● Vim
IDEs
● Eclipse (Open Source)
○ PDT Plugin (Open Source)
○ Aptana PHP (Open Source)
■ Aptana Studio Pro (Commercial)
○ Zend Studio (Commercial)
● NetBeans (Open Source)
● PhpStorm (Commercial)
● NuSphere PhpED (Commercial)

46. What Do Employers Look For?
● A college degree, so you are on the right track
● Code examples. Will typically check for a Github
account. Make sure you have some publicly contributed
code. Open Source Projects are good place to do this.
● Certifications
○ Zend PHP Certifications http://www.zend.
com/services/certification/
○ MySQL Developer http://education.oracle.
com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getpage?
page_id=458&get_params=p_track_id:MDEV

47. How Can You Improve Your Skills?
● SD PHP User Group
● Conferences
○ Code Works (Los Angeles Dec 12)
■ http://codeworks.phparch.com/los-angeles/
○ PHP Tek (Chicago every year, usually May)
■ 2013 has not been announced yet
■ http://tek.phparch.com/
○ ZendCon (October)
■ http://zendcon.com/
● Contribute to Open Source
● Practice, practice, practice
● Learn to know what you don't know

48. What Else Do Employers Look For?
PASSION
Development is a very personal thing.
A developer needs to be creative,
logical, focused, and enjoy what they
are doing. Get involved with the PHP
community. Forums, StackOverflow,
Local User Groups like SDPHP ;-)

49. Resources
Local
San Diego PHP Meetups => http://www.meetup.com/SanDiegoPHP/
Facebook => https://www.facebook.com/groups/SanDiegoPUG/
IRC => freenode.net #sdphp
Twitter => @sdphp / @shocm / @johncongdon / @williammanley
Others
Zend.com
StackOverflow => http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/php
php|Arch => http://www.phparch.com/

50. Credits
Original Presentation by
William Cahill-Manley - Application Developer for Submodal
Twitter: @williammanley
Email: william@sdphp.org
Today's Presenters
John Congdon - Senior Web Developer at Networx Online
Twitter: @johncongdon
Email: john@sdphp.org
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/johncongdon
Eric Van Johnson - Systems Architect at AMCO International Education Services, Inc.
Twitter: @shocm
Email: eric@sdphp.org
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/vanjohnson