Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript, 7th Edition

Chapter 22. Bringing It All Together

Now that you’ve reached the end of this book, your first milestone along the path of the hows, whys, and wherefores of dynamic web programming, I want to leave you with a real example that you can sink your teeth into. In fact, it’s a collection of examples, because I’ve put together a simple social networking project comprising all the main features you’d expect from such a site, or more to the point, such a web app.

Across the various files, there are examples of MySQL table creation and database access, CSS, file inclusion, session control, asynchronous calls, event and error handling, file uploading, image manipulation, and a whole lot more.

Each example file is complete and self-contained yet works with all the others to build a fully working social networking site, even including a stylesheet you can modify to completely change the look and feel of the project.

Being small and light, the end product is particularly usable on mobile platforms such as a smartphone or tablet but will run equally well on a full-size desktop computer. As an exercise, you may wish to adapt the code further, perhaps including utilizing React in some way.

I have tried to keep this code as slimmed-down as possible to keep it easy to follow. Consequently, there’s a great deal of improvement that could be made to it, such as smoother handling of some of the transitions between being logged on and off—but let’s leave those as the proverbial exercises for the reader, ...