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

# What is a Function?
A *function* is a block of code that is written in order to perform a *specific* task. 

Let's discuss a real-life example to understand the concept better. Suppose that a headmaster wants a teacher to calculate the average marks of the students in a class for a particular subject. The teacher will note down all the marks of the students for that subject, perform the required calculations to calculate the average mark and then report the result to the headmaster. 

Functions work in a similar way. They take the required information to perform a task as **input parameter(s)**, perform the required **operations** on these parameters, and then they **return** the final answer.

# Types of Functions
In PHP there are two major types of functions:

* Built-in functions
* User-defined functions

## Built-in Functions
PHP already provides quite a few *built-in* functions that a user can use. These *functions* are **pre-defined** and just need to be called. [Here](http://php.net/manual/en/indexes.functions.php)
is a list of built-in functions in PHP.

 ### User-defined Functions

Apart from **built-in** *functions*, PHP also allows us to make our own **customized** *functions*. These *functions* can be written such that they would perform the required task wherever necessary once they're called. 

# Implementation

Now let's discuss the method to write a **user-defined** *function* below.







This lesson will give a basic introduction to functions and its types, like inbuilt and user-defined functions, as well as their PHP syntax.

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

Introduction

What is a Function? #