In the PHP course at BCIT, we learned some important concepts, such as:

• sessions
• cookies
• arrays
• file management
• MySQL
• output buffering
• regular expressions
• and more . .

The text used to support the course was 'PHP Third Edition' by Larry Ullman. The text provided background material for all of these topics, and was supplemented by course material (located at http://webapps.bcit.ca/mdia4325/).

To me, the course was marred by the mistakes in the course materials as well as examples that didn't work.

These included:

• File application didn't work
• Wedding database application didn't work and one of the files was corrupted
• Wine store application was non-existent

These issues would have been not too bad if the content was new. It's not. The content has been around for years, so there's not much of an excuse to have these issues.

It's a great course to offer web developers, however BCIT really needs to address the currency and accuracy of the course notes and examples. Then again, more than one of these courses has this problem. It doesn't help that there seem to be about 2 students enrolled per semester, thus making a course re-design financially not very viable.

I shouldn't complain though, as I received 98% on this course.