PHP Tutorials

If you’ve never written a computer program before, the whole idea may be quite intimidating. Most programmers will probably tell you (if they aren’t embarrassed to admit it) that they were intimidated when they began. However, the programming process isn’t all that difficult and, contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to have an extremely high IQ to be good at it.

When you write a program, your main goal is to translate your idea into a language that the computer can understand. For example, if you were teaching a person how to cook hamburgers, you would first describe the process of forming the ground beef into patties. Then, you would tell the person how to put the burgers on the grill, how long to leave them there, and finally how to remove them.

Of course, just because you can describe the process of making hamburgers doesn’t mean PHP is going to be cooking anything for you anytime soon. The point is, if you can describe a process like I just described making hamburgers, you can write a program.

Writing a PHP program is simply the process of describing to PHP how to do something. By the time you’ve finished reading this book, you will understand all the concepts behind writing a PHP program. Those concepts are like the words and sentences used to describe hamburgers. The more you read this book, the more “words” you will understand, and the better you will be able to “describe” your task to PHP. Thus, you will learn to write PHP programs to suit whatever need or idea you have, and soon it won’t be any more intimidating than telling someone how to cook hamburgers.

Some programming problems might be very complex when examined as a whole. For example, creating a shopping cart is definitely not a simple task. However, a shopping cart can be broken into a few smaller tasks. Those tasks might include adding and removing items, which are both tasks that can break into even smaller tasks. You will find that any task, no matter how complex, can be broken into smaller ones until each task is simple enough that breaking it down further is unnecessary. This process is explained in more detail when you begin creating programs with more complexity (especially in Chapter 17, “Putting It All Together,” when we walk through the whole process of creating a complex program step-by-step).