Getting started - web programming from scratch in PHP

The second in a twice-monthly series of programming lessons starting from scratch. All welcome to attend, from complete beginners up (the more experienced can help teach!). This will be very informal, I'll be plugged into a large screen to demo some stuff and we'll sit around a big table and code-along.

Goals for the first session:

• Create your programming environment
• Set up an Amazon EC2 instance
• Make sure you can securely connect to it from your laptop
• Install a web server and database (Apache and MySQL)
• Create a database and populate it with some data
• First steps in programming PHP
• Create a hello world program
• Write code to access a database (display contents of a database)
• Write code to process a form (search a database)
• Write code to process a form (enter data into the database)

We'll set aside some time for general Questions and Answers.

Once you've mastered these skills you should be ready to start making basic web apps (quizes, todo list etc). From there, the only limit is your imagination.

Next meetups will cover more advance topics like user logins, session management, frameworks and more. But we'll try to keep these beginner level events happening around once a month. Also happy to work/teach in Python and demo some real-world apps and tools depending on demand.

I was in the Avalon recently for another event and their lounge area seems pretty quiet and open to hosting us, so lets test this as a venue - ideally if you buy a couple coffees/beers that'd help keep them happy.