| PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language
that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded
into HTML. If you are new to PHP and want to get some idea
of how it works, try the introductory tutorial. After that,
check out the online manual, and the example archive sites
and some of the other resources available in the links section.
Ever wondered how popular PHP is? see the Netcraft Survey.
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, or go right to the introductory
tutorial if you are only interested in web programming.
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