Advanced Skills
By Angela Bradley, About.com Guide
Before you attempt things on this page you should have a basic knowledge of PHP and MySQL. Here we will cover some more advanced PHP skills as well as some walkthroughs of scripts you can create with PHP and MySQL.
Advanced PHP
Here are some skills not covered in our basic tutorials, but that you might need when you get into more in depth PHP programming. Although they are broken down to be easy, you will probably understand them better if you already have a working PHP knowledge.
- Using Cookies with PHP
- Basic PHP Sessions
- Execute PHP from an HTML file
- Preg Functions
- Building Variables from Variables
- Uploading Files with PHP
- Using Encryption
- Including External Files
- Writing to a File from PHP
- Read Files and Return Data
Example Scripts
Here you will find actual coding examples of things you can do with PHP and MySQL. You can use these as stand alone scripts, or as a jumping off point for creating your own custom scripts.
GD Library
The GD Library is used to create and manipulate graphics via PHP. You can create an image from scratch, create thumbnails for your photos, add text to photos, resize images, recolor images, and more.