Introduction

[00:00:00]
>> Maximiliano Firtman: Welcome to PHP Fundamentals, we will have a full day to talk about this new language, okay? For all language, okay, we'll see. So we'll talk about PHP. Let me first introduce myself. My name is Maximiliano Firtman, I can go by Max or Maxi it's up to you.

[00:00:21]
My website, third.dev, I'm typically third on a lot of social networks, or if not, third. So I'm from Argentina, I live in Buenos Aires, and I've been a mobile web developer for a while. I have started as a web developer in 1996, okay? So HTML, CSS, JavaScript. And I think my first year of, let's say, backend developer, we were not actually talking about frontend and backend at the time we were just doing everything we were webmasters.

[00:00:53]
That was a term that we used at the time we were just doing website, now it's full stack developer. But we were just doing everything. My first year, I was actually ASP team. ASP was actually, at that time, we were using BBScript, was a Microsoft alternative to PHP.

[00:01:11]
But then I have started using PHP actually in 1999. So yesterday I went to my backup of all my projects, and I capture my first dot PHP file. It was actually from 1999, so a lot of time actually has passed. Actually, we will talk about today, about PHP 8, that's the version that we have these days, the latest version.

[00:01:36]
And that file was actually dot PHP 3, the first version, the first version that I have started using PHP 3. So I've done more than 150 web apps, not all of them were in PHP. So of course, after that, I started doing other or using other backend languages, but I still maintain some websites that are written in PHP.

[00:02:00]
So I'm also an author, so I author 13 books, also a lot of courses on many topics, typically on web development, most of the time, around frontend, around mobile app development and web performance. And you can see there are a lot of books and covers mostly you will find some words there.

[00:02:23]
You pick some words, mobile, web, performance, that kind of stuff. The latest book that I author is Learn PWA, that was published by Google at web.dev, and it's free. It's available for free on web.dev, Learn PWA. At Frontend Masters, also you will find a lot of content that I author on Frontend, progressive web apps, vanilla JavaScript, APIs, different kind of APIs, mobile app courses, Kotlin, Swift, Dart with Flutter, and some backend courses.

[00:02:57]
This is kind of part of that group. I also have another one on go. So, what we're going to cover today? So, we will talk about, what's PHP, why PHP? I think that's the first question that most people is doing these days. So, why? We will see why, the PHP syntax, we're going to start completely from scratch, which with PHP.

[00:03:20]
We will talk about things like super global variables. So those are things that are kind of new, no matter which language you coming from. We will talk about different, it's a different paradigm. I mean, it's not a new paradigm because it's been for 30 years, actually, but it's new for most of you, it depends on where you're coming from.

[00:03:39]
So if you're doing JavaScript, if you're doing Java, Python, no matter where you're coming from, we'll talk about, okay, what's the PHP paradigm? OOP, so Object Oriented Programming with PHP, and working with data. So we are going to start with the basics. Seeing the syntax, the differences, the life cycle of a PHP script.

[00:04:03]
And then we will make a couple of little projects, small projects, like we will directly live code in some small projects, so you will actually get that and working with data. In that case, we will use a small database, so we will see how to use the JSON databases.

[00:04:20]
How to make an API, how to work with that, okay? And before talking about some advanced techniques, debugging and best practices. And of course, after that, there will be much more to go over on PHP, but you will get all the fundamentals, the prerequisites for the course. So what do you need to know?

[00:04:40]
It's just priming basic experience in any language, okay, it's fine if you know JavaScript it's fine, if you know C it's okay. Some OOP concept will be good. I'm not going to explain what a class is, what a super class is, I will understand that you know those concepts if not you can get them from other courses, some HTML, basic background will be good as well.

[00:05:04]
We're not going to write a lot of HTML, but just some basic ones, and we will see, why are we talking about HTML when we're talking about PHP as well? Because it doesn't sound initially like something that has a relationship with in terms of what do you need to install in your computer?

[00:05:21]
The only thing that we will use today is a PHP interpreter. It has what is not downloading PHP. Later I will explain how to do that, what's the best practice to do that on every operating system? It's free, it's open source. The website is php.net. Then we will use a browser, any browser will work.

[00:05:41]
And you have a browser and a code editor, I'm going to use a BS code, but you can use any other editor, or whatever you wanna use, it's fine, okay? We don't need anything else.