PHP Tutorial

What is PHP?

PHP was at first created as a simple scripting platform called "Personal Home Page". Nowadays PHP (the short for Hypertext Pre-Processor) is an alternative to Microsoft's Active Server Page (ASP) technology. It is an open source server-side language, which is used for creating dynamic web pages, which will be embedded in HTML. PHP is usually used in conjunction with a MySQL database on Linux/UNIX web servers. It is one of the most popular scripting languages among today's web developers.

A unique feature of PHP is that it can also be embedded within those HTML pages that are saved with a .php file extension, allowing you to change the content of many web pages at a time by simply modifying one .php file. A server-side PHP engine transforms all PHP sections into HTML and the visitor does not see any of the PHP script.

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language and interpreter that is freely available. A full explanation of all the PHP tags, complete user manual and lots of tutorials can be found on PHP's official page.