Introduction Web programming with PHP

Course number EBS2040 (old code 3020S), 2009-2010
Maastricht University School of Business and Economics

Important Notice: because of some troubles with the connection in the library, I extended the deadline of having completed the exercises to Tuesday, January 19 2010, before midnight.

But please note that the deadline of the project is NOT extended so this remains on Sunday evening before midnight. If possible finish the exercises today and start working on the project.

Short course description

PHP, officially called: “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”, is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language. It is somewhat similar to Javascript but the main difference is that Javascript is executed at the client side whereas PHP is executed at the server side.

In the mid 1990’s many Web developers found that existing tools and languages were not ideal for the specific task of embedding code in markup. Those developers joined to develop a server-side scripting language which they felt would be ideal for developing dynamic web-based sites and applications. Most of PHP's syntax is borrowed from C, although there are elements borrowed from Perl, C++ and Java as well. Nowadays, PHP is the most used server side scripting language, followed by Microsoft's ASP (Active Server Pages).

Perhaps the strongest and most significant feature in PHP is its support for a wide range of databases. Writing a database-enabled web page is incredibly simple. Although PHP supports many databases, we will concentrate on MySQL.

This course gives an introduction in programming with PHP in combination with some simple MySQL queries in order to be able to understand the working of a tool like PHP. In the first week we will discuss the features of PHP whereas in the second week students have to build one or more applications on a web-server. These applications will be discussed and will be used for examination.

The book we will use this year is:

Ullman, Larry, 2009, "PHP For The World Wide Web", Third Edition, PeachPit Press, ISBN 0-321-44249-0

Additional literature (such as an introduction to HTML) will be made available trough the Internet.

Block coordinator: Dr. Huub Meijers

Webmaster: Herman Pijpers