PHP: Server-Side Web Development from First Script to Production Architecture
PHP runs on more than 75% of all websites with a known server-side language, including WordPress, Wikipedia, and Facebook's early infrastructure. It is a pragmatic, well-documented language with a massive ecosystem, and learning it opens direct paths to backend web roles, freelance work, and full-stack development. This track covers PHP end to end — from printing your first variable to designing domain-driven microservices.
What You Will Learn
You will start with variables, types, control flow, functions, and arrays, then move into form handling with GET and POST, file system operations, and regular expressions. The intermediate phase covers object-oriented PHP — classes, inheritance, interfaces, traits, namespaces, and PSR-4 autoloading — alongside MySQL with PDO and prepared statements, session and cookie management, and consuming REST APIs with JSON. You will then build real applications with Laravel, covering MVC routing, Eloquent ORM, authentication, queues, and building REST APIs. The advanced tier addresses PHP security (XSS, CSRF, SQL injection), unit testing with PHPUnit, caching with Redis and Memcached, performance profiling, and asynchronous PHP using Fibers, ReactPHP, and Swoole. The track closes with Design Patterns, SOLID principles, GraphQL APIs, CI/CD pipelines with Docker, Domain-Driven Design, Hexagonal Architecture, microservices, and PHP internals.
The Learning Path
Forty-nine courses progress from A1 through C2, organized into clear phases. The first ten courses (A1–A2) establish the language fundamentals: syntax, strings, dates, HTML embedding, and form basics. The B1 block introduces OOP, Composer, databases, and PHP 8.x features. B2 moves into Laravel, security, deployment, and unit testing. At C1 you tackle Symfony components, async PHP, message queues, GraphQL, mutation testing, and Dockerized CI/CD pipelines. The C2 capstone courses — Domain-Driven Design in PHP, Clean and Hexagonal Architecture in PHP, Building Microservices with PHP, and PHP Internals and Writing Extensions — bring the depth expected of a senior backend engineer.
How It Works
Each course is split into short, hands-on lessons you complete in the built-in code editor with real-time feedback. An AI tutor is available whenever you get stuck, explaining errors and guiding you to the correct solution without giving it away outright. You can move at your own pace — returning to review fundamentals or skipping ahead if you already know the basics.
