What you should know before watching this course

- This is an intermediate course so you need to be comfortable writing PHP scripts. Most examples involve only a few lines of code, but I expect you to know the basic syntax of PHP, such as working with loops and conditional statements. You also need to be familiar with PHP classes and objects. Virtually every feature in the standard PHP library is object oriented. Some features are abstract classes so you'll need to know what an abstract class is and how to extend it.

If you haven't worked with classes and objects before, don't let that put you off. It's actually very easy. Jon Peck's course, Object Oriented Programming with PHP, here in the lynda.com on-line training library covers all you need to know. If you're ready to start, all you need is a testing server running PHP 5.3 or later. Some features that I'll be covering require PHP 5.4 or 5.5 but I'll point those out at the relevant time.

There aren't many of them so PHP 5.3 is a good base line. You don't require any external libraries. The standard PHP library is, well it's standard, it's a core part of PHP. Of course, you'll also need a text editor or IDE to write the code. I'll be using PHPStorm but any editor will do. Choose whichever you feel most comfortable using. Ideally though, it should have PHP code hinting or auto-completion.

SPR class names are verbose, so code hints will save you a lot of typing and help avoid errors.