Backend development

Stage 1 of 7 · 10 lessons · ~6 months

Your language and how HTTP works

Get fluent in one backend language and its runtime, and learn exactly what happens between a client and your server. Everything later in this roadmap sits on these two things.

Start: The terminal and Git

Lessons· one lesson for each topic, in this order

  1. 1The terminal and Git
  2. 2Modern PHP syntax and types
  3. 3Arrays, functions and classes
  4. 4Errors and exceptions
  5. 5Composer and autoloading
  6. 6How PHP runs a request
  7. 7DNS: from a name to an address
  8. 8TCP connections and TLS
  9. 9HTTP requests, responses and headers
  10. 10HTTP methods and status codes

Start with· follow one of these

  • VideoFree
    PHP For Beginners

    Laracasts · Beginner

    Free video series that builds a small app in plain PHP before any framework

  • GuideFree
    PHP: The Right Way

    Josh Lockhart and contributors · Intermediate

    Modern PHP practice in one place: Composer, PSR standards, PDO and security basics

Practise

  • Exercism

    Your language track: small exercises with free mentor feedback on idiomatic code

Keep handy

  • W3Schools

    Quick syntax lookups for your language when you forget how something is written

  • MDN Web Docs

    Read the HTTP overview, methods, headers and status code pages until they feel obvious

Also worth your time

Before moving on: Write a small PHP command line script with Composer and PHPUnit tests, push it to GitHub in sensible commits, and explain every line of output from curl -v against a real website.

Tauseef's advice
Learn PHP 8 with strict types and Composer, and ignore old tutorials that mix SQL into HTML files. Plain PHP first is worth it: you will understand what Laravel does for you instead of treating it as magic.

Mark this stage as not done?