Welcome to PHP

Introduction

Early era web developers with dynamic ambitions had little more than server side includes in their toolbelts -- it was a dark era indeed. The need for embedded server-parsed scripting languages was apparent, and Microsoft went after this hunger with their ASP, or Active Server Pages, technology. The concept behind ASP, and all other embedded server-parsed languages, is premised upon embedding programming code within the HTML that makes up a web page. The web server interprets and executes this code, replacing the code with its results, and delivering the resulting web page to the browser. Popular though ASP became, many developers continued wanting for a more stable and less proprietary solution: enter PHP, an open-source server-parsed embedded scripting language.

In this introduction we'll take a look at programming with PHP 3, the most popular version of PHP, although PHP 4 is just around the corner. The art and science of computer programming is a much larger topic than any one language, and cannot be the focus of this introduction -- while PHP is accessible to programming newcomers, it will be easiest for those with even a small background in programming other languages such as BASIC, Pascal, C, JavaScript, Perl, and so on.

Why PHP >