Learn PHP basics with hands-on practice in hello world in PHP, variables in PHP, functions in PHP, arrays in PHP, PHP inheritance, PHP exceptions, and more.

This interactive course introduces you to the fundamentals of PHP programming, one of the most widely used languages in web development. Starting with a simple hello world in PHP, you’ll explore the basics, including PHP output, variables in PHP, and PHP data types. You’ll also learn about PHP constants, arithmetic operators, comparison operators, logical operators, and assignment operators.

The course progresses into conditional statements in PHP, PHP switch, and various loops such as PHP for loop, PHP while loop, and more. You will then dive deeper into functions in PHP, understand PHP variable scope, and learn PHP pass by reference or value. Additionally, you’ll gain a working knowledge of strings in PHP, PHP string operations, and handling arrays in PHP, including PHP multidimensional arrays.

In the advanced sections, you’ll explore classes in PHP, inheritance, constructors, and destructors, handling PHP exceptions with PHP throw and catch exceptions.

Learn PHP

# Variables
A variable in any programming language is a named piece of computer memory, containing some information inside. Variables are one of the essential parts of a computer program. You can declare a variable in PHP using a `$` sign followed by its name,  e.g., `$myVariable`.

Consider the following PHP code where we store data in two variables and print them.
The `$str` variable contains a **string**, and the `$num` variable contains an **integer** data type. We will discuss strings and integers later in the lesson. 

<?php
$str = "I will be back by";
$num = 5;
  
echo $str;
echo " "; // Output: I will be back by
echo $num; // Output: 5
?>

# Data types
Along with the name of variables, their sizes may vary too. In most programming languages (like C++ and Java) you can use different *data types* for your variables. PHP, however, does not have explicit type definitions, but the type of a variable is determined by the type of the value that it is assigned, or by the type that it is [cast](http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.type-juggling.php) to.

There are different data types for different purposes, i.e., **null**, **boolean**, **integer**, **float**, **string**, **object**, **resource**, and an **array**. Here is a brief overview of the types. For a detailed documentation and examples, see the [PHP documentation](http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.php).

## Null
Null can be assigned to any variable. It represents a variable with no value.

# Variables
A variable in any programming language is a named piece of computer memory, containing some information inside. Variables are one of the essential parts of a computer program. You can declare a variable in PHP using a `＄` sign followed by its name,  e.g., `＄myVariable`.

Consider the following PHP code where we store data in two variables and print them.
The `＄str` variable contains a **string**, and the `＄num` variable contains an **integer** data type. We will discuss strings and integers later in the lesson. 

This lesson discusses how you can use variables to store data and the various types of these variables, i.e., data types.

PHP Basics

PHP Variables

PHP Operators

PHP Conditional Statements

PHP Loops

PHP Functions

PHP Strings

PHP Arrays

PHP Assessment 1

PHP Classes

Exception Handling in PHP

PHP Assessment 2

Variables and Data Types

Variables

Data types