What is PHP (Hypertext Pre-Processor)?

Hypertext Pre-Processor widely known as PHP. It is a server-side scripting (similar to Microsoft's ASP) language. PHP is a powerful tool for making dynamic and highly interactive web pages, this scripts are special commands that must be placed within web pages.

What you should already know?

If you are willing to learn PHP then it is highly recommended that you have a basis understanding of few web development languages such as;

·        HTML/XHTML

·        JavaScript

PHP is a server-side scripting language, scripts are executed on server-side. PHP can support various database such as MySQL, Informix, Oracle, ODBC, etc).

Why to use PHP?

The biggest advantage of PHP (Hypertext Pre-Processor) scripting is that it is open-source web development tool, which mean absolutely free to download and use. Many community members help this language to keep it up to current industry standard and use to update on regular basis.

It can run on different platforms or operating system such as Windows XP, Windows 7, Linux, Unix, etc. PHP is also compatible with almost all server this days for example Apache and IIS. Other than this, it is easy to learn with basic knowledge of HTML you can efficiently run it on the server.

What do PHP pages look like?

They are very similar to HTML tags, however HTML starts and ends with LESSER-THAN (<) and GREATER-THAN (>) brackets, where as PHP scripting starts with "<?php" or "<?" and usually ends with "?>", known as opening tags and closing tags respectively, between this two tag all the mambo-jumbo is done.

With PHP scripting you get some extra freedom of placement, by placement i mean you can insert scripting anywhere you like, even inside HTML tags.


Post Continued: PHP Tutorial - Where and How To Begin?