PHP Masterclass - go from beginner to advanced

Explain how a web request is processed by Apache on the server, running index.php through the PHP engine and returning HTML to the client.

Open VS Code, create the PHP Masterclass folder, and write syntax.php to practice PHP opening tags, short open tags, and echo statements, then test output in a localhost browser.

Learn PHP comments, including single-line // and multi-line /* ... */. Comments are not executable and boost readability for teams.

Explore PHP variables as pointers to memory, master valid names using alphanumeric characters and underscores, and compare assignment by value versus by reference, with isset and vardump for initialization checks.

Define constants in PHP with define, name them in capitals, assign a string path, and access them globally; explore magic constants like __LINE__, __DIR__, and __FILE__.

Learn how PHP's dynamically typed variables determine data types, and explore scalars, compounds, and specials with examples of boolean, integer, float, string, arrays, objects, callables, iterables, resources, and now.

Explore arithmetic operators in PHP, including plus, minus, multiplication, division, and modulus; learn how to compute remainders and basic expressions.

Explore PHP bitwise operators, including and, or, xor, and shift operators, with practical demonstrations using numbers 5 and 6 to produce 4, 7, 3, and 12 through binary calculations.

Learn how assignment operators store values in memory, reference variables, and update them with combined operators like += for division, multiplication, modulus, shift, and string concatenation.

Learn how PHP increment and decrement operators work, including pre- and post- forms, with x starting at 10, showing pre-increment 11, post-increment 11 then 12, and pre-decrement and post-decrement behavior.

Explore value comparison in PHP: equality and inequality operators, strict type checks, and relational operators, with numeric coercion examples and var_dump demonstrations.

Discover how the PHP string concatenation operator, the period, joins two strings to form one, with practical examples like hello . world and adding spaces for proper formatting.

Explore PHP logical operators: and (&&), or (||), exclusive or (^), and not (!). See how they operate on booleans, using symbol and word forms, with precedence and parentheses.

Explains PHP strings using single and double quotes in quotes.php, showing that single quotes do not pass while double quotes pass, and echoes the values in the browser.

Learn how the here doc syntax in PHP creates multi-line strings without escaping, using a delimiter and closing identifier. See how variables are expanded inside the here doc and echoed.

Explore the nowdoc syntax in PHP, its similarity to here doc, and the rule to enclose the starting identifier in single quotes so variables aren't evaluated.

Learn to extract substrings in PHP using substr with a zero-based start index and optional length, echoing the result from the string 'my life will never be the same'.

Learn string location and comparison in PHP by using strpos to locate the first occurrence from a given index, and compare strings with case-insensitive str case cmp and case-sensitive strcmp.

Learn to compare strings in PHP with similar_text to count similar characters and compute similarity, then use Levenshtein to find the minimum edits between strings.

Explore string character and word counting in PHP, using strlen and str_word_count with practical examples like 'i love you' to show characters including spaces and word counts.

Explore phonetic functions in PHP, including soundex and metaphone, to search names by pronunciation despite different spellings, compare codes, and implement practical search techniques.

Learn how to convert strings to arrays and back in PHP using explode and implode, manage delimiters, and print arrays for debugging.

Learn how arrays in PHP map keys to values, using numeric indexing starting at zero and associative indexing with string keys. Access, modify, and print elements with print and echo.

Learn how to add values to a PHP array using array_push, append, and array_unshift to end or begin, and print the numbers array in the browser.

learn how to remove values from a PHP array using array_pop and array_shift, removing end or beginning elements and returning the removed value through practical examples.

Learn how to split arrays in PHP with array_slice, using offsets, a length, and the preserve keys option to see indexed outputs.

Explore how the PHP range function creates an array from an interval with an optional step. Demonstrates range(1,5) and a 1.5 step producing 1, 2.5, 4.

Apply callbacks to arrays using array_walk, array_walk_recursive, and array_filter, with both named and anonymous functions, and process multidimensional arrays like groceries.