O'Reilly Open Source Convention - August 1-5, 2005

Tutorial
SOLD OUTLearning PHP 5
David Sklar, Software Architect, Ning, Inc.

Track: PHP
Date: Monday, August 1st, 2005
Time: 8:30am - 12:00pm
Location: E141
Instead of a dry walkthrough of keywords and syntax, this tutorial presents an applied introduction to PHP 5 by building a complete database-backed web application: a social bookmarks manager that can be used by a community to tag and share interesting URLs.

Participants learn best PHP practices for:
- Displaying and processing HTML forms
- Talking to a database
- Identifying users with sessions and cookies
- Securing your code against common hacker attacks
- Manipulating numbers, strings, and arrays
- Debugging and troubleshooting problems in your code

Code examples in the tutorial highlight new capabilities of PHP 5 such as the improved object oriented programming model, iterators, overloading, and XML processing.

Students in the tutorial should be handy with HTML, familiar with programming in another language like Perl, C, or Python, and not total strangers to SQL and relational databases.