Preface

PHP powers the vast majority of the web today. It is by far the most ubiquitous and accessible mature web language, and welcomes thousands of new developers every day. It is this ease of access that can, admittedly, sometimes give it a bad name - good resources are few and far in between, and the competition is real, driving people to take shortcuts, skip best practices, and learn on-the-fly.

With PHP 7+ came some improvements that make it harder to make mistakes, and 7.2 is making things even safer, even more structured. If you're just getting started with the language, you're in luck. Not only will it be ever harder to slip up and make mistakes, but content such as this—hand picked from the excellent SitePoint PHP channel—will help you get started the right way.

Once you've chewed through these modern introductions and re-introductions into popular tools and concepts which will undoubtedly become a permanent part of your tool belt, why not head on over to the channel and check out some articles or video courses that deal with these topics in more depth? Found something interesting you'd like covered? Let us know. For now, just dive in—it's the first step that's most important, and you're half way through yours. Happy PHPing!

Bruno Škvorc, SitePoint PHP channel editor.

Conventions Used

You’ll notice that we’ve used certain layout styles throughout this book to signify different types of information. Look out for the following items.

Code Samples

Code in this book is displayed using a fixed-width font, like so:

<h1>A Perfect Summer's Day</h1>
<p>It was a lovely day for a walk.</p>
			

Some lines of code should be entered on one line, but we've had to wrap them because of page constraints. An ➥ indicates a line break that exists for formatting purposes only, and should be ignored:

URL.open("http://www.sitepoint.com/responsive-web-design-real-user-testing/?responsive1");
			

Tips, Notes, and Warnings