The problem, succinctly stated, is: How do you best organize 14 weeks of study to teach PHP to a group of motivated College students?

I know they must be pretty motivated, because they’re signing up for the class despite the fact that it starts at 8 am.

This Fall, I will  be teaching a course in Web Application Development at FSU.  The topic will be server-side scripting, and the focus will be PHP.  Since I’ve taught this course before, developing the curriculum won’t take months, but I am nevertheless spending a fair amount of time updating and tweaking for the next go-around.

A quick Google Search for “Teaching PHP” brings up only a few relevant links, most message board discussions.  “Server Side Scripting Curriculum” doesn’t return much either.  Likewise, WaSP have not yet published their recommended server-side scripting course recommendations.

So, I’ve had to come up with a lot of the course unilaterally.  The learning objectives are as follows:

By the end of the course, students will understand:

• Basic programming skills
• Web application development principles
• How to find and use PHP resources on the Internet
• How to manage tasks, bugs, and revision control mechanisms for web projects

By the completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Program and deploy simple scripts in PHP
• Process web-based input and output in PHP
• Build multi-file PHP applications
• Connect PHP applications to a database
• Design a simple dynamic website using PHP, MySQL, HTML, and CSS

After a few iterations of course development, here are the topics I have planned to discuss, in order, thus far:

• The current “State of the Internet”
• How the technology works – Web servers and clients
• Eclipse setup and good  practices for personal workflow
• PHP basics – Syntax, variables, arrays, functions, iterators, etc.
• Form processing (GET/POST)
• Database integration
• Multi-file application organization
• Classes and objects
• MVC frameworks
• Revision control and associated workflow
• Basic management: Ticket and bug tracking
• Web Services – SOAP and RPC
• XML integration
• Comprehensive application organization

That’s a lot of information.  Fortunately the students will have object-oriented experience AND database experience.  So, we should be able to leap off the cliff quickly and into the world of iterators, encapsulation, and inheritance.

I’ll post the week-by-week calendar when I finalize it, which necessity dictates will be very soon.  Feel free to grab it and use it for your own courses, or tell me what I can improve on.