Course Introduction

Quick reference

• 00:05 Welcome to Intro to PHP for Web Development, my name is John Elder, and
• 00:08 I'll be your instructor today.
• 00:09 In this course, I'm going to teach you everything you need to know to learn PHP
• 00:12 for web development, and I'm very excited about this course, I hope you are too.
• 00:16 PHP is just a lot of fun to use, it's been around forever,
• 00:19 it's one of the most stable and the most used programming language online.
• 00:23 And one of the reasons why it's so popular, PHP is not the newest,
• 00:27 greatest programming language, it's been around for a long time.
• 00:31 But the reason why it's so popular is for one very, very specific thing,
• 00:35 and that is WordPress.
• 00:36 WordPress is built completely with PHP, any time you want to tinker with
• 00:41 WordPress, or change it, or do anything at all, you're gonna be working with PHP.
• 00:47 And I don't know what WordPress controls now, but it is something like, I don't
• 00:51 know, 70% of all websites, WordPress websites, or some crazy stat like that.
• 00:56 But if you're interested in WordPress, you're gonna be working with PHP.
• 01:00 But, apart from WordPress, PHP is just a great language to use,
• 01:03 you don't need to use it with WordPress, you can use it for anything at all.
• 01:06 And we're not gonna be spending any time at all looking at WordPress in this
• 01:09 course, I'm gonna just teach you the fundamental basics of PHP, and then if
• 01:13 you actually want to use it for WordPress, you'll have the tools that you need.
• 01:16 So, in this course,
• 01:18 we're going to spend a lot of time talking about just basic programming concepts,
• 01:22 things like variables and operators, and loops, and if then statements, and
• 01:27 if else statements, and arrays, and all those sort of basic programming things.
• 01:32 I'm gonna teach you how to do all that stuff with PHP,
• 01:34 we'll spend a little bit of time looking through the PHP documentation online.
• 01:38 It's completely free, and it has all kinds of great stuff that you can look up and
• 01:42 read on if you're interested in certain things.
• 01:45 I'm also gonna teach you how to use version control in GitHub,
• 01:48 GitHub is a popular website for computer programmers for
• 01:51 a lot of different reasons, we'll get into that.
• 01:54 And we're also gonna talk about Heroku, which is a free hosting service, well,
• 01:58 it's paid, but there's a free part of it that we can use, and
• 02:00 we're going to use in this course.
• 02:02 So, we'll start out, we'll set up our own development environment, and
• 02:05 this is what it's gonna look like, it's a cloud9.io.
• 02:08 And we'll get into this later, and I'll show you how to use this and everything,
• 02:11 it's also free.
• 02:12 But after I teach you the basics,
• 02:14 we're gonna create this very simple math flash card game.
• 02:17 And it's just, you can see, ten plus two equals 12, Submit, Correct.
• 02:22 Four plus six equals 66, Wrong, just is a very basic thing.
• 02:26 But it's going to allow us to tie together all of the things we learned throughout
• 02:30 this course into a fun little app, something you can stick in your
• 02:33 portfolio if you're looking for work as a PHP programmer.
• 02:36 It's always good to show things that you've created to potential employers and
• 02:40 things like that.
• 02:40 So I'm really looking forward to this course, I think it's gonna be a lot of
• 02:45 fun, PHP is just so useful and so easy to use once you learn the basics.
• 02:48 You're gonna be surprised just how quick and easy you pick this up.
• 02:51 In the next video, we're gonna dive right in, talk about what is PHP,
• 02:55 what it's used for, and yeah, looking forward to it.

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