PHP Tutorial


Introduction to PHP


PHP a recursive acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" is a widely-used Open source general-purpose scripting language for creating dynamic and interactive websites and can be embedded into HTML. It is the widely-used, free, and efficient alternative to its competitors such as Microsoft's ASP.

Now some history of it...PHP was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf as a means of monitoring page views for his online resume, and slowly started making a mark.

    First version of PHP was released in mid 1995 as PHP/ FI by Rasmus Lerdorf.

    In 1997 came PHP/FI 2.0 with a lot of contribution from people around the world but it was still at large a one-man project.

    Then in June 1998 came PHP 3.0 as the official successor of PHP/FI 2.0 developed by Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski. One of the biggest strengths of PHP 3.0 was its strong extensibility features. In addition to providing end users with a solid infrastructure for lots of different databases, protocols and APIs,

    In May 2000, PHP 4.0 was released by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski. In addition to the highly improved performance of this version, PHP 4.0 included other key features such as support for many more Web servers, HTTP sessions, output buffering, more secure ways of handling user input and several new language constructs.

    PHP 5 was released in July 2004 which is the latest version




    Why should you learn PHP?


    - PHP runs on different platforms be it Windows, Linux, Unix, etc., its not platform dependent like other scripting language.

    - PHP is compatible with almost all servers used today Apache, IIS, etc.

    - PHP is an open source and free to download from the official PHP resource: www.php.net

    - PHP can work with over 19 different types of databases

    - PHP is easy to learn and runs efficiently on the server side




    Prerequisites to learn PHP


    1. Knowledge of HTML
    2. Knowledge of any scripting language



    How to install php


    XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start. Depending upon the platform you are using, you can download the xampp distributions from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

    Or if you want to install everything step by step then

    1. Download and install Apache for free here: http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi

    2. Download and Install PHP for free here http://www.php.net/downloads.php. Its installation manual is available at http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.php

    3. For any database functionality download MySQL for free here: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/index.html



    Next - PHP Tutorial : Your first PHP Program