Youth Tech's Online PHP Class

Hosted by YTCC Spark

Introduction

Youth Tech is proud to introduce our first online programming course.  The course will actually be designed and taught as two parts: the live instruction (and Q&A session) in the chatroom and the course notes/source code here on the webpage.

The chat will be hosted in #ChatShack each Sunday evening at 8:00PM EST.  During the chat portion, I (YTCC Spark) will go over the lesson for the week as well as answer any questions that may come up.  Important questions or notes revealed during the chat will be posted at the bottom of the appropriate page here.

The lessons below should be published one a week.  I hope to get each week's lesson out immediately following the previous chat.  If I discover that a given topic requires more/less attention, I will revise the lesson plan as neccessary.

In order to best complete this course, you need a host who supports PHP (and preferably MySQL).  If you do not already have one, you may contact YTCC CPU and he will provide an account suitable for completing this course.

NOTE: Please don't expect me to have an answer to an obscure question ready for you right off the bat.  While I'm good with PHP, this doesn't mean I know EVERYTHING there is to know... far from it.  I hope to expand my knowledge of PHP as well as we go through this course.  Maybe I'll learn some new tricks.

The Course

At this time, I am only laying out the lesson plan for the basic topics until I can see how well I am managing time with the course.  As we progress, I will also see what the students (YOU) are most interested in learning.

At the end of some of the lessons, I will place an assignment for you to complete.  If you have a problem with the assignment, you can ask me during the chat or email me.  I invite everyone to complete the assignment.  I will not be grading these, as nobody is forcing you to learn PHP.

Lessons

Click on the title to see the course, or click on the chat date to see a transcript of the chat.

1. Introduction, Basic Format, Output [Chat: 7/12/02]
2. Variables and More Output [Chat: 7/19/02]
3. Input [Chat: 8/2/02]
4. If statements [Chat: 8/9/02]
5. Loops [Chat: 8/16/02]
   (It is about this time that I took an extended vacation from YouthTech.  However, I'm back now and hope to finish this article [sans Chats] soon. -- Spark)
6. "Scoping" Variables and Functions [Chat: 8/23/02]
7. Arrays [Chat: 8/30/02]
8. Libraries and E-Mail [Chat: 9/6/02]
9. File Handling [Chat: 9/13/02]