PHP for beginners

An article by numan saeed    1 Comment

This tutorial is fully designed for those who want to learn PHP from beginning. They have just learned HTML and JavaScript and now want to learn server side scripting language.

Prerequisites for PHP

Before to start this learning PHP, you must to learn HTML because HTML is the core language and we have to embed the PHP code in it. Therefore, HTML is very important for a web developer.

What is PHP?

PHP is a web development language which stands for “Hypertext preprocessor”. When PHP was first introduced, its name was “Personal Home Page”, but due to its vast usage, its name changes to “Hypertext Preprocessor” through a community vote.
PHP is a server side programming language, which can be embed in HTML as like ASP, but PHP and HTML are not same because HTML is a rendering language, not a programming language which inserts images, links, text, tables etc in a webpage along with its formatting, but still HTML can’t add two numbers nor make a connection with a Database.
PHP is an official Module of Apache HTTP server, which is the market leading free server.
According to Netcraft web server survey, about 67 percent of world wide websites uses PHP as the language.
PHP is used for creating Dynamics websites.
Difference between Dynamics web pages and static web pages is that the structure and contents of dynamics web pages changes through back end programming while structure and contents of static pages are fixed whenever designer change it by himself.
PHP can control all the big databases like MSsql, Mysql, Postgre SQL, SQLite, Access, Oracle etc.
In PHP, you can create all types of websites like Forums, E-Commerce, Photo Gallery, Sites Layouts, Multimedia websites, News, Content Management Systems, File Management Systems etc in a very short time.
PHP is supported by windows, Linux and all other operating systems. About 15 millions web servers support PHP nowadays.
PHP code is not sent by server to client like HTML, but server first parse PHP code and then send to client in HTML format. Check the source of a page, you will not see any PHP code.