Week 4: Refresh PHP and Learn How to Access a Database

From Thursday till Saturday of this week, I finally managed to get some work done for our website: I learned how to access a database with PHP.

Thursday: Refreshing PHP

For the Project Creative Technologies in the first quartile of the second study year, I had already learned the basics of PHP because I wanted to upload and analyse images with the Google Cloud Vision API. But I needed to refresh my faded knowledge, which I did with the amazing YouTube PHP tutorials by mmtuts. It was also a good occasion to set up xampp and with it the Apache server and PHPmyadmin again, since I had installed xampp on my laptop but I got a new laptop on which I did not have it installed yet. Learning PHP again was easier than learning it for the first time, but I realised that I had really forgotten a few things, for example how to include another PHP file in a file. That is going to be really useful for my website.

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Friday: SQL Basics

On Friday, I learned the basics of SQL requests and insertations within PHPmyadmin - still with the mmtuts tutorials. I was a bit distracted on that day and did not work super productively but I am still proud of my achievements - I created my first database and I added rows into it.

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Saturday: PHP and SQL

On Saturday, I watched mmtuts' tutorials that explain how the SQL code can be embedded into PHP by creating variables that are, together with the connection to the database, entered in a mysql request. It was really useful and I have already managed to learn the most important basics: How to add rows to a database and how to add values and how to filter for certain values by using PHP. After completing these tutorials, I also realised that at this point, I need a clearer vision of the database and its intended use - so I am really looking forward to seeing Johannes next week and discussing his suggestions with him.