Welcome to PHP

Why PHP?

Developers have literally flocked to PHP, with its modest learning curve, free and open development, native database connectivity, stability, and availability for a variety of platforms. Still, it is important to understand that PHP is not a unique solution to web development -- we're fortunate these days to enjoy a potpourri of possible web development tools with which to work. Many tasks can be performed with a wide variety of technologies, so one has to weigh many factors in choosing a development path: past experience, platforms, time-to-market, and so forth. Many Perl developers, especially, wonder about the value of PHP. In truth, PHP like any language offers several advantages and also possesses several disadvantages to consider.

PHP's primary strength is in rapid development of dynamic web pages. Developers without heavy programming experience can leverage PHP to complete tasks otherwise cryptic or obtuse in altnerative languages, such as pulling records from a database and inserting them into an HTML table. The architecture of the PHP language is simple but powerful, and includes an extremely wide variety of functions suited for many tasks, both traditional data processing tasks and more web-oriented functions as well.

On the other hand, one could argue that PHP remains an immature language, without the architectural elegance or extensibility of Perl, for instance. Whereas some developers find embedded scripting, where program code is often mixed together with HTML structure, empowering, other developers find this approach disorganized and bug-prone, preferring separate development environments for each web component. Developers with experience in Perl and especially mod_perl environments may find little reason to spend time with PHP, and this may be entirely justifiable.

That said, this is an introduction to PHP, so let us assume you are at least a bit curious!

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