Course Overview

Below is a quick overview and a list of samples for this particular course.

Skills Acquired
  • PHP
  • MySQL
Samples

 

Education Section > Usability & Website Design

LIS4930-07 - Web Programming PHP

Summer 2008

Instructor: John Marks

I had worked with PHP a little bit coming into this course, but I had mostly worked with just simple PHP contact forms. However, by the time this course was finished I felt I had gained a very good grasp on the language. I left this course with an intermediate knowledge of PHP. The course had three small assignments, and two bigger ones, one being a final project.

The small assignments were mostly simple programs. The first assignment was to work with echo statements and variables. We stored our names in a variable and echoed the variable inside the HTML title tag and in the page itself. The second small assignment focused on simple arrays, integer calculations, and basic if statements, giving you a good idea of the basics of the main concepts. Finally, the third assignment was to take assignment two and break it down into separate files. This allowed us to work with the require and include PHP statements. We also had our first chance to create some functions. The small assignments were relatively easy, but they gave me the ground work for the syntax and gave me the understanding of the main concepts of the language (loops, functions, classes, etc). These assignments adequately prepared us for the larger assignments.

The first larger assignment, a bit more complex than the smaller assignments, was to create a database and a PHP page that would allow a user to delete and add employees to a database. This assignment appeared to be easy on the surface, but once I started working on it, I realized it was a bit more complex than I originally anticipated. Setting up the MySQL database and connecting to it was pretty easy. The hard part was managing the sessions. I had to learn how to use the $_GET, $_POST and $_SERVER super global variables to manage sessions and allow the user to navigate the pages that would allow them to add or delete the employee. I also had to learn how to take data from a database, store it into an array, and then output the list using a loop. Doing this helped me create an employee directory. With this assignment, I also learned how to create HTML links that included GET variables, which allowed me to control the sessions. Overall, I learned a great deal from this assignment and the experience was definitely a help when it came to the final project.

Then there was the final project, which was done in groups. My group and I decided to make a survey generator for our final project. This was the first time I had to do a coding assignment within a group. Prior to this I had coded websites or other programs on my own, so I was eager to get the group experience as it was something I had never done before. This project is also where I learned a great deal about how to use PHP and MySQL to make dynamic websites. For this project, I did the bulk of the programming, since I seemed to grasp the concepts a bit more than my fellow group mates. However, we worked together on the whole thing, combining our knowledge and strengths to work together to solve the problems we faced. I did most of the syntax because I had the better handle on it. However, I fully understood all the logic behind the project. By coupling the logic with the syntax experience, I was able to get a lot out of this project. Once it was completed, my group mates and I also worked out the bugs and added comments into the code. We felt confident and proud of the work we had done. All of us knew we had learned a great deal about PHP.

Skills Acquired

Samples