Introduction to PHP

PHP is a Web development language written by and for Web developers. PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. The product was originally named Personal Home Page Tools, and many people still think that's what the acronym stands for. The name was selected by community vote. PHP is currently in its fifth major rewrite, called PHP5 or just plain PHP.

PHP is a server-side scripting language, which can be embedded in HTML or used as a standalone programming language (although the former use is much more common). Comparable languages in this area are Microsoft's Active Server Pages, Macromedia's ColdFusion, and Sun's Java Server Pages.

Normally PHP is used to generate (X)HTML.

1. History
2. Four Reasons to use PHP
3. Adding PHP to HTML
4. PHP Syntax
5. PHP and Datatypes
6. PHP Variable Interpolation
7. Passing Information between pages
8. Basics of PHP Arrays
9. Functions in PHP
10. PHP Exceptions
11. PHP superglobals

Bibliography

• PHP web site, http://www.php.net
• PHP Manual, http://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php
• PEAR web site, http://www.pear.php.net
• Tim Converse,Joyce Park, Clark Morgan, PHP5 and MySQL Bible, Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2004.
• David Sklar, Learning PHP 5, O'Reilly 2004.
• David Lane, Hugh E. Williams , Web Database Application with PHP and MySQL, 2nd Edition, O'Reilly 2004.