📄️ Introduction
What PHP is, how the web works, installing PHP on every major operating system, writing your first script, and understanding the PHP request lifecycle.
📄️ Variables & Types
Declaring variables with the dollar sign, understanding PHP's data types, working with constants, type juggling, and inspecting values with var_dump.
📄️ Operators & Expressions
Learn how PHP combines values with operators -- arithmetic, assignment, comparison, logical, and string concatenation. Understand loose vs strict comparison and operator precedence.
📄️ Control Flow
Making decisions with if/else/elseif, switch and match, looping with while, do-while, for and foreach, and combining control structures in real programs.
📄️ Functions
Defining and calling functions, parameters and return values, type declarations, variable scope, closures, arrow functions, and built-in PHP functions.
📄️ Strings & Arrays
Master PHP strings -- concatenation, heredoc, common functions, and multibyte handling. Then dive into indexed and associative arrays, looping, essential functions, and practical examples.
📄️ Forms & HTTP
HTML forms, GET and POST requests, superglobals, input validation, and building a contact form.
📄️ OOP Basics
Classes and objects, properties and methods, constructors, visibility modifiers, getters and setters, static members, class constants, and a practical Product and ShoppingCart example.
📄️ OOP Advanced
Inheritance, abstract classes, interfaces, traits, namespaces, autoloading, and building flexible object-oriented systems.
📄️ Error Handling
PHP error levels, configuring error reporting, exceptions with try/catch/finally, custom exception classes, and debugging techniques including Xdebug.
📄️ Files
Reading and writing files, CSV and JSON, directory operations, file uploads, path functions, and security best practices.
📄️ Databases
Relational databases, PDO, CRUD operations, prepared statements, transactions, and building a simple task manager.
📄️ Sessions & Cookies
HTTP statelessness, cookies with setcookie(), PHP sessions, flash messages, and building a secure login/logout system.
📄️ Composer
Dependency management with Composer, installing packages, PSR-4 autoloading, semantic versioning, and security best practices.
📄️ Modern PHP
PHP 8.0 through 8.4 highlights including named arguments, enums, readonly properties, property hooks, and choosing your PHP version.
📄️ Web Application
Build a complete Notes application with registration, login, CRUD operations, routing, templates, and database integration using concepts from the entire guide.
📄️ Practice Projects
Six hands-on project ideas -- from beginner to advanced -- to reinforce everything you learned in the PHP Beginners Guide.