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Welcome to Tracks

Treehouse Tracks are guided curriculums that cover all relevant Courses and Workshops necessary to master a subject. Treehouse’s learning library includes dozens of Tracks on a variety of topics including web design, programming, and more. With Compass, you’ll also be able to test out of subjects you already know, and create a custom curriculum for your learning goals.

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16 hours Track

Intermediate PHP


With roughly 80% of all websites using PHP, it's a strong technology for starting a web development career.

By the end of this Track, you’ll have the skills needed to create dynamic content by storing and retrieving data through the use of databases and files including CSV, XML and JSON.

As a prerequisite for this Track, we recommend our Beginning PHP Track.

To start, we'll cover some SQL fundamentals with our SQL Basics course and Reporting with SQL course. This will lay the groundwork for using PHP to interact with databases. Next, we'll learn the $_GET and $_POST commands and how to use them to work with data more efficiently in PHP.

The next part of the Track is our 4-hour course on Integrating PHP with Databases. We'll refactor a personal media library application by replacing an associative array with a database to provide a better method of data storage.

Following that, we'll learn about data persistence and three ways to persist data in a browser: Forms, Sessions and Cookies. Finally, we'll dive into CRUD operations and file handling with PHP.

Treehouse is the premier place to learn PHP. Come continue your journey with us!

  • An entry-level salary for the technologies covered in this track is about $60,000 / yr on average.

  • Some companies that use these technologies regularly include: Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, LinkedIn, WordPress, Digg, Intel, Pinterest, and Twitter