PHP - Introduction

This is the boring bit of all my part’s to come, I am hoping that eventually in the next couple of part’s we can get this into fun fun fun but this is certainly helpful to know, especially if your going to be tested in a school, college, university or somewhere else.

What is it?

PHP originally stood for Personal Home page when it was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf, as it grew it became used for many useful things such as tracking visitors, eventually PHP grew and was renamed PHP: Hypertext Processor which means it handles things within HTML.

PHP is HTML embedded, meaning you can use it within HTML, it is not a programming language which people often think it is, it is in fact a scripting language. To put it in a much easier way it means that only when an event happens that the code you have wrote is triggered e.g. When someone clicks a submit button it will carry out the action such as sending a post on the forum.

The big disadvantage to PHP is that you can’t use client side feature that some websites have, to have client side features you would have to use another language such as JavaScript which can interact with the browser to do things such as image rollovers and much more...

Why learn PHP?

As I have not yet learnt it, I am hoping all you lot reading will learn with me, i have looked into why and it should be easier to learn than the alternatives, the alternatives being CGI, ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion and more...
PHP is free; this makes it great for those people that can’t afford to pay for resources and other thing, there are hundreds of thousands of examples of different PHP scripts from easy to hard making it easy to find out how to do something, no one script is the same, if you get two scripts you could make it into one to make yourself the perfect script.

How PHP works?

Just to sum it up.

Normally when you go on a website you put in the web address and the server send back the resulting HTML page, however when you use PHP the address is put in and the server then sets the PHP to work before sending that information to the HTML page which will then be shown on your page! Magic.

What do you need to learn HTML?

Well you can use a couple of things, you can get a webhost on the internet that will allow the use of PHP pages as not all free hosts do, though its worth looking for a free one if your not too serious about learning PHP, on the other hand you could go to PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor and download PHP free of charge, all you need to do is install it and configure it on your computer, meaning then PHP pages will be able to run on your computer.

Well that is the end of my 1st boring bit maybe a 2nd to come but then it will be all fun fun fun, this is just to give you a formal introduction , if you have any questions or suggestions please say so i will do my best to answer all I can, keep checking for the next parts!

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