Essential PHP: The Direct Route to Laravel and CodeIgniter

This short PHP Essential book is designed to be the quick and solid bridge you need to master the language fundamentals and make the jump to modern frameworks like Laravel and CodeIgniter. We focus on logical reasoning and best practices so you can build dynamic and maintainable web applications.

The book assumes that you already know how to program; in other words, it is NOT a book to learn how to program but rather to understand the basics of PHP and provide the tools to migrate to a framework.

What You Will Learn with this book

The course content practically covers all the necessary pillars to program with PHP professionally:

1. Environment Preparation

• Quick Installation: Configuration of a modern development environment with Laravel Herd (or Linux equivalents).
• Code Editor: Efficient use of Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and essential extensions.
• The PHP Flow: Understanding how PHP is interpreted on the server to generate and serve HTML to the browser.
• First Program: Creating your first "Hello World" to validate the configuration.

2. PHP Programming Fundamentals

• Variables and Data Types: Handling variables with the $ symbol, essential types (string, integer, boolean, array, object), and naming rules.
• Concatenation and Strings: Using the dot operator (.) and interpolation with double quotes.

3. Modularization and Logic

• Functions: Creation, invocation, and use of parameters.
• Returning Values: Implementing the return command to reuse results.
• Strict Typing: Best practices when typing arguments and function returns for greater security.

4. Flow Control (Decision Making)

• Conditionals: Mastery of if, elseif, and else structures for exclusive logic.
• Switch Structure: A clean and readable alternative for evaluating multiple cases.
• Modern Operators: Introduction to concise assignment with the Ternary Operator (? :) and Null Safety with the ?? (Null Coalescing) operator.

5. From Pure PHP to Framework (The Goal)

Avoiding "Spaghetti Code": Understanding why mixing logic and HTML is unsustainable.

The Need for Frameworks: Preparation to adopt Laravel or CodeIgniter as a solution for separation of concerns (MVC) and creating structured applications.