LAMP is the acronym for a powerful and commonly used suite of open source tools:

• Linux operating system,
• Apache web server,
• MySQL database management, and
• Perl or PHP programming language.

This is a continuation of the Web Skills course in the sense that these topics are touched on briefly in the latter few hours of Web Skills, but here each of the five components is treated in more detail. Students will have access to their own subdomain names (such as studentlastname.eightytwenty.net) on our server.

Weeks 1 and 2

The first weeks will introduce the concepts of Open Source, and two Open Source utilities: the MySQL database and the PHP programming language. Elementary SQL and data normalization techniques will be covered. The sample database will be expanded to allow for more sophisticated data relationships and queries.

Weeks 3 and 4

Students will create their own simple content management system. This allows web site authors the ability to add content to a database, where the PHP program extracts the data to produce pre-formated web pages. The content management system will allow the addition of simple edits, like boldface and italic text, and hyperlinks.

Weeks 5 and 6

Students will learn to backup the databases, and control access to content. Advanced SQL will be introduced.

Weeks 7 and 8

In the final weeks of the course, students will learn how to increase security with server-side includes. Students will create semi-dynamic pages to reduce server load, upload files to the database, and send emails programmatically. Cookies and PHP sessions will also be covered, using a simple shopping cart as an example.