1.2 Prerequisites

Before we get started actually talking about PHP forms, what we need to do is talk a little bit about some of the prerequisites and some of the assumptions that I'm gonna be making before we get started with this course. The first assumption that I'm going to be making is that you have a little bit of experience with PHP. You've either watched some videos with it, you've done a little bit of work on it on your own, or you've even followed one of the other PHP courses here at Tuts+. A good one to have followed if you haven't done this already is the PHP Fundamentals course. There's a lot of really good content in here that's gonna take you through a lot of the basics that is really gonna get you up and running very, very quickly. Now if you already have some background in PHP and you've already done some of that, then you can kinda skip over that. And we're just gonna dig into some of the things that you need to look for and things that you need to do when dealing with forms in PHP. Now, if you've never used PHP, and this is all completely new to you, then like I said, I would highly recommend following this course. The other thing that you're gonna need to have is to make sure that you have PHP installed. Now, if you've already followed the PHP Fundamentals course, then you're probably already there. But if you're working on a different machine or you haven't done this in a while, I would highly recommend you follow the What You Need 1.2 lesson in that course. And it's gonna take you through the process of getting up and running with PHP by installing a tool called Mamp. Now, you have a couple of different options when it comes to installing PHP on your machine. You can either do it manually. And if you wanna learn how to do that, you can head over to php.net/manual/en/install.php. And this is part of the documentation and it's gonna take you through the process of doing all of the installation and configuration of PHP in a manual fashion depending on your platform. You can absolutely follow this and get up and running. Now it is a little bit of extra work. And I would highly recommend you using a kind of pre-configured stack, like MAMP or something along those lines or other stacks out there XAMPP, WAMP, there is all sorts of different ones. But MAMP is one of the ones that I like to use if I'm ever needing kind of like a full stack server in a box kind of a thing, then this is what I'm gonna use. So if you don't have PHP installed and you need to get up and running quickly, then I would highly recommend you downloading MAMP and go ahead and running that on your machine. That will get you up and running with PHP as well as some other tools that we're not really gonna talk a whole lot in this course about. But you'll be able to use them to get up and running and start to write your PHP forms. Now also you're gonna need a decent text editor. So hopefully you already have one that you like to use. You can absolutely use any sort of built-in text editors that come with your computer. You can use other third-party ones that are free, or paid, or whatever. You can definitely use whatever ones that you want. I'm gonna be using Visual Studio Code in this course. It's one of my favorite not only text editors, but code editors as well. It has very good integration with PHP, so I'm definitely gonna be taking advantage of that today. And so once you have all of these things downloaded and installed, just to make sure that you can follow along, you're gonna need to open up a terminal. And just to be sure, you're gonna run php-version, just to make sure that you have it installed. Now if you have installed MAMP, you can go ahead and use the tooling there to get the web server up and running to be able to handle requests and serve PHP applications. That will be just fine. Now, in this course I'm actually going to kind of get around that and just use a very simple built-in PHP development server that I'm gonna show you to run in the next lesson. But once you have everything installed, you'll be ready to go. And also, as far as the versions of PHP that you have installed or that you need to install, it's really not a big deal if you have something that was maybe built into your computer. So if we're talking about a Mac or a Unix based system, a lot of those already come with PHP installed, a lot of them have PHP 5.6. If you have that installed, you can just go with it, that'll work just fine. If you have a later version, I believe at the time of this recording 7.2.9 is the most recent, so you could use that one if you want. I'm using as you can see here 7.1.16, it really doesn't matter. We're not really gonna be using any crazy, deep down embedded features of PHP, it's gonna be very basic stuff. So any version, for the most part, of PHP should work just fine. So once you've got all of this installed, up and running and ready to go, we're ready to start digging into looking at how we can successfully create and handle forms in our PHP applications.