Well, these were the questions that I asked myself when I thought about a simple server side scripting language that I can use to explain some basics to a novice web developer.
I decided to go with PHP for the following reasons:
- I read couple of chapters from a book (Head First PHP and MySQL) and went through couple of lessons in W3C Schools and felt it was easy.
- I checked in dice.com and found more job opportunities for a PHP developer than a Ruby on Rails developers.
So....
- I followed this web site http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/47548d/how-to-install-wamp-server-on-windows-8-1/ and insalled WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server on my winodows 8.1 machine. Surprisingly, it was simple and straight forward. NOTE: Steps 1 through 8 were good enough for me and the WAMP server was up and running like an Arabian horse.
- From localhost index page, I opened the sqlbuddy and created a sample table in test database.
- I wrote the following simple program that talked to the database and provided me the response:
<?php
// Connecting to a database using parameters...
// mysqli_connect(hostname, username, password, database name)
$dbc = mysqli_connect('localhost','root','','test')
or die('Error connecting to MySQL server.');
// Select statement to get data from 'person' table
$query = "select firstname, lastname from person";
// Executing the query
$result = mysqli_query($dbc,$query)
or die("Error querying database");
// Accessing the data that is obtained
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)) {
echo $row['firstname'] . " " . $row['lastname'];
echo "<br>";
}
// Closing the database
mysqli_close($dbc);
?>
?>
So much for a day, huh? I am happy because I learnt something today!
