Express course – Develop Web Apps/SaaS with PHP and ATK

Hi, my name is Romans and I am a professional freelance Web application developer. I participated and built many SaaS apps, have worked as CTO for various web start-ups and have been a very active open-source contributor. I teach secondary students how to build useful web apps as a hobby.

I offer you this ORIGINAL COURSE where I will introduce you to a very powerful “PHP + ATK + Heroku” combination. To my knowledge it’s the FASTEST and the most EFFICIENT approach for building powerful web apps.

How is this course different?

My goal is not to give you “introduction” to gazillion free web technologies, instead I will keep my focus on those core technologies and keep going deeper and deeper eventually enabling you to build and deploy sophisticated web apps. ATK is pretty new framework, but its core goal is to make web development simpler, more friendly, not more complex.

What about Laravel/Symfony?

In my course you’ll learn an efficient way to build Web UI and work with Data. If you know one of Laravel/Symfony/Wordpress already, you can use it together with ATK.

How does PHP compare with Ruby/JavaScript/Python?

PHP is the most popular language for websites and web apps. It alway was. NodeJS is trendy. Ruby on Rails was trendy in 2006 and is now in decline. But there is a good reason why PHP remains #1 for web sites – it runs everywhere, it’s easy to install, it’s easy to learn and it’s really fast. Don’t take my word for it – verify it yourself on “Google Trends”.

What does “Express course” mean in the title?

Most courses I’ve seen here will start at the very beginning and will dedicate some limited time on various technologies you need to build web apps. 3 lectures on HTML. 2 lectures on CSS and so on. Quite often you have to listen to over 200 lectures before you get your application online!

FOR EXAMPLE: many professional developers DON’T USE SQL language. They rely on “data abstraction frameworks”. Also many Web Developers DON’T write CSS or HTML themselves. They use CSS frameworks. So, unless you want to be a Website Designer, there is no real need for you to master HTML/CSS. Yet other courses will insist on giving you a comprehensive introduction for all the fundamentals. Why spend your time on them now, if you might not need them in the future?

In my course I only teach you technologies which you will absolutely need to make Web Apps. Sometimes I’ll suggest you where you can learn more about those supplementary technologies, but I remain very firmly focused on the goal.

What are the milestones?

If know nothing about web apps and you start my course now, then:

• In one hour, you will know how to run your own web app in the cloud and use version control.
• In two hours, you will be able to work with database and build interactive applications, and use 3rd party services for sending SMS messages.
• In three hours, you will learn about relations, expressions and data aggregation.
• In four hours, you will know how to make SaaS multi-user apps and send out nicely-looking emails.
• In five hours, you will know how to work with files and accept on-line payments.

Additionally, we will be implementing lots of web apps. If you need, pause my videos and try following me with your own code editor. Also – work on assignments.

DO NOT SKIP LECTURES. To save time I rarely repeat things. Make sure you fully understand every lecture before moving on. If not – please post questions in “Q/A” section.

Other courses to learn?

After finishing this course, I recommend:

• If you wish to be a better frontend/mobile developer – Learn React. It can interact with ATK / PHP through RestAPI.
• If you wish to tweak UI – Learn CSS and dig deeper into Semantic UI.
• If you wish to self-host your apps – learn more about Docker and Kubernetes.

IMPORTANT: I’m still working to record videos in the curriculum. I typically release several videos every week. Because my material is NOT COMPLETE, I am giving you access to my course FOR FREE. Please consider that before leaving a review.