Make the leap into server-side programming with a comprehensive cover of PHP & MySQL. We'll use PHP to pass variables in forms, cover database design principles, control access and publish data on the web. It's everything to take you from Novice to Ninja!

PHP & MySQL: Novice to Ninja, 6th Edition

Preface

In this book, I’ll guide you as you take your first steps beyond the static world of building web pages with the purely client-side technologies of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Together, we’ll explore the world of building websites, and discover the dizzying array of dynamic tools, concepts, and possibilities they open up. Whatever you do, don’t look down!

Installation

Now that you have your virtual server up and running, it’s time to write your first PHP script. PHP is a server-side language. This concept may be a little difficult to grasp, especially if you’ve only ever designed websites using client-side languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Introducing PHP

In Chapter 1 , we booted the Homestead Improved virtual machine. The virtual machine contains all the software we need, including a MySQL server.

Introducing MySQL

This is it—the stuff you signed up for! In this chapter, you’ll learn how to take information stored in a MySQL database and display it on a web page for all to see.

Publishing MySQL Data on the Web

Since Chapter 3 , we’ve worked with a very simple database of jokes, composed of a single table named (appropriately enough) joke . While this database has served us well as an introduction to MySQL databases, there’s more to relational database design than can be understood from this simple example. In this chapter, we’ll expand on this database and learn a few new features of MySQL, in an effort to realize and appreciate the real power that relational databases have to offer.

Relational Database Design

Before we plow headlong into the next enhancements of our joke database, let’s spend a little time honing your “PHP-fu.” Specifically, I want to show you a few techniques to better structure your code.

Structured PHP Programming

In the last chapter, I showed you how to break the code up into easily reusable functions. This has several advantages:

Improving the Insert and Update Functions

In the last chapter, I showed you how to write generic, reusable functions that could be used to manipulate any database table. In this chapter, we’ll move those functions into a class, to avoid some of the repetition that’s needed when they’re used.

Objects and Classes

Now that you’re able to write a controller with methods, and call those methods from index.php , the next step is to add the rest of the pages for managing the website. Currently, we can add jokes to the database through index.php by specifying an action URL parameter. However, a real website will need to do considerably more than handle basic database operations for a single table.

Creating an Extensible Framework

Now that we’ve done all the hard work of building an extensible framework, it’s time to add some new functionality to the website. We’re going to make it so that users can register accounts on the website with a view to letting them post jokes themselves.

Allowing Users to Register Accounts

In the last chapter, I showed you how users can register accounts on the website. Now it’s time to make those accounts functional, so that users can log in to the website. The process is familiar to web users: they enter a username and password, and get access to content that’s unique to their account.

Cookies, Sessions, and Access Control

At the core of most well-designed, content-driven sites is a relational database. In this book, we’ve used the MySQL Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) to create our database. MySQL is a popular choice among web developers because it’s free, and because MySQL servers are fairly simple to set up. As I demonstrated in Chapter 1 , with proper instructions and a pre-configured Vagrant box, getting a MySQL database up and running only takes a couple of minutes.

MySQL Administration

As you’ve worked through the construction of the Internet Joke Database website, you’ve had opportunities to explore most aspects of Structured Query Language (SQL). From the basic form of a CREATE TABLE query to the two syntaxes of INSERT queries, you probably know many of these commands by heart now.

Relationships

We’re almost there! We’ve designed a database to store jokes, organized them into categories, and tracked their authors. We’ve learned how to create a web page that displays this library of jokes to site visitors. We’ve even developed a set of web pages that a site administrator can use to manage the joke library without knowing anything about databases.

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