- Table of Contents
- What is PHP?
- What can PHP do?
PHP (recursive acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor") is an open-source server-side
HTML-embedded scripting language.
Simple answer, but what does that mean? An example:
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Example 1-1. An introductory example
<html>
<head>
<title>Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
echo "Hi, I'm a PHP script!";
?>
</body>
</html>
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Notice how this is different from a script written in other languages like Perl or C --
instead of writing a program with lots of commands to output HTML, you write an HTML script with
some embedded code to do something (in this case, output some text). The PHP code is enclosed in
special start and end tags
that allow you to jump into and out of "PHP mode".
What distinguishes PHP from something like client-side JavaScript is that the code is
executed on the server. If you were to have a script similar to the above on your server, the
client would receive the results of running that script, with no way of determining what the
underlying code may be. You can even configure your web server to process all your HTML files with
PHP, and then there's really no way that users can tell what you have up your sleeve.
The best things in using PHP are that it is extremely simple for a newcomer, but offers
many advanced features for a professional programmer. Don't be afraid reading the long list of
PHP's features. You can jump in, in a short time, and start writing simple scripts in a few
hours.
Although PHP's development is focused on server-side scripting, you can do much more with
it. Read on, and see more in the What can PHP do? section.
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