Free online coursePHP for Beginners: Learn PHP, MySQL, MVC, Routing, Authentication and Testing

Course Description

PHP for Beginners is a free web development course from Laracasts designed to take you from first principles to building real, secure, database-driven applications. It starts with the fundamentals of the language and the workflow you need to be productive, then quickly moves into writing clean PHP that separates logic from presentation for maintainable code.

As you progress, you will learn how to think in requests and responses, create your own routing system, and structure an application using clear conventions. You will connect PHP to MySQL using PDO, extract reusable classes, and manage configuration for different environments. Along the way, you will explore essential security practices, including understanding SQL injection risks and safely handling untrusted input.

The course also introduces practical application building through a small notes project, helping you move from isolated syntax to full features. You will work with forms, validation, resourceful patterns, controllers, and middleware, then expand into sessions, user registration, login, and logout. Password handling and authorization concepts are covered with a focus on habits that scale beyond beginner projects.

To round out the journey, you will learn modern PHP tooling such as Composer, autoloading, and namespacing, and you will be introduced to automated testing with a TDD mindset using Pest. If you want a structured, hands-on path into PHP, MySQL, MVC-style organization, routing, authentication, and testing, this course offers a complete starting point for building confident backend skills.