PHP, MySQL, & JavaScript All-in-One For Dummies

Richard Blum

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119468332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming in PHP
• Index: Computer Science

Explore the engine that drives the internet

It takes a powerful suite of technologies to drive the most-visited websites in the world. PHP, mySQL, JavaScript, and other web-building languages serve as the foundation for application development and programming projects at all levels of the web.

Dig into this all-in-one book to get a grasp on these in-demand skills, and figure out how to apply them to become a professional web builder. You'll get valuable information from seven handy books covering the pieces of web programming, HTML5 & CSS3, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, creating object-oriented programs, and using PHP frameworks.

• Helps you grasp the technologies that power web applications
• Covers PHP version 7.2
• Includes coverage of the latest updates in web development
• Perfect for developers to use to solve problems

This book is ideal for the inexperienced programmer interested in adding these skills to their toolbox. New coders who've made it through an online course or boot camp will also find great value in how this book builds on what you already know.

Book 1

Getting Started with Web Programming

Contents at a Glance

1. Chapter 1: Examining the Pieces of Web Programming
   1. Creating a Simple Web Page
   2. Creating a Dynamic Web Page
   3. Storing Content
2. Chapter 2: Using a Web Server
   1. Recognizing What’s Required
   2. Considering Your Server Options
   3. Tweaking the Servers
3. Chapter 3: Building a Development Environment
   1. Knowing Which Tools to Avoid
   2. Working with the Right Tools

Chapter 1

Examining the Pieces of Web Programming

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding how simple web pages work

Incorporating programming into your web page

Storing content in a database

At first, diving into web programming can be somewhat overwhelming. You need to know all kinds of things in order to build a web application that not only looks enticing but also works correctly. The trick to learning web programming is to pull the individual pieces apart and tackle them one at a time.

This chapter gets you started on your web design journey by examining the different pieces involved in creating a simple web page. Then it kicks things up a notch and walks you through dynamic web pages. And finally, the chapter ends by explaining how to store your content for use on the web.

Creating a Simple Web Page

Before you can run a marathon, you need to learn how to walk. Likewise, before you can create a fancy website, you need to know the basics of how web pages work.

Nowadays, sharing documents on the Internet is easy, but it wasn’t always that way. Back in the early days of the Internet, documents were often created using proprietary word-processing packages and had to be downloaded using the cumbersome File Transfer Protocol (FTP). To retrieve a document, you had to know exactly what server contained the document, you had to know where it was stored on the server, and you had to be able to log into the server. After all that, you still needed to have the correct word-processing software on your computer to view the document. As you can imagine, it wasn’t long before a new way of sharing content was required.

To get to where we are today, several different technologies had to be developed:

• A method for linking related documents together
• A way for the document reader to display formatted text the same way in any type of device
• An Internet standard allowing clients to easily retrieve documents from any server
• A standard method of styling and positioning content in documents

This section describes the technology that made viewing documents on the Internet work the way it does today.

Kicking things off with the World Wide Web

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee developed a method of interconnecting documents to make sharing research information on the Internet easier. His creation, the World Wide Web, defined a method for linking documents together in a web structure, so that a researcher could follow the path between related documents, no matter where they were located in the world. Clicking text in one document took you to another document automatically, without your having to manually find and download the related document.

The method Berners-Lee developed for linking documents is called hypertext. Hypertext embeds links that are hidden from view in the document, and directs the software being used to view the document (known as the web browser) to retrieve the referenced document. With hypertext, you just click the link, and the software (the web browser) does all the work of finding and retrieving the related document for you.

Because the document-viewing software does all the hard work, a new type of software had to be developed that was more than just a document viewer. That’s where web browsers came into existence. Web browsers display a document on a computer screen and respond to the reader clicking hypertext links to retrieve other specified documents.

To implement hypertext in documents, Berners-Lee had to utilize a text-based document-formatting system. Fortunately for him, a lot of work had already been done on that.

Making sense of markup languages

Markup languages were developed to replace proprietary word-processing packages with a standard way of formatting documents so that they could be read by any type of document viewer on any type of device. This goal is accomplished by embedding tags in the text. Each tag indicates a formatting feature, such as headings, bold or italic text, or special margins. What made markup languages different from word-processing packages is that these tags were common text codes instead of proprietary codes, making it generic enough that any device could read and process them.

The first popular markup language was the Generalized Markup Language (GML), developed by IBM in the 1960s. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) took up the challenge of creating markup languages and produced the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), mainly based on GML, in the 1980s. However, because SGML was developed to cover all types of document formatting on all types of devices, it’s extremely complex and it wasn’t readily adapted.

Berners-Lee used the ideas developed in SGML to create a simplified markup language that could support his ...