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PHP basics

by Gloria McConnell, Rough Draft Managing Editor and Tool Snoop

Pages on the Internet used to be HTML and HTML alone.  Now we see a complete aphabet soup of file extensions on the Web. In this column, let’s take a look at just one: PHP.

PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. Yes, it’s true – the first word of the acronym is the acronym itself.  (Wikipedia explains that it originally stood for Personal Home Page because the original developer created it to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage.) 

What is it?

According to the official PHP Web site, http://www.php.net, PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

Why use it?

Why do developers use it? Angela Bradley on About.com says three top reasons exist:

1. PHP works great with HTML. So, if you are already have a website and are comfortable with HTML, it will be easy to move to PHP to add new features to your site.
2. PHP offers interactive features. PHP allows you to interact with your visitors in ways HTML alone can’t. This can mean simple things like e-mail forms, or more elaborate things like shopping carts that save your past orders and recommend similar products.
3. It’s easy to learn. PHP fundamentals are fairly simple, and an abundance of scripts exist that you can use and tweak for your own special needs.

Learning PHP

If you are interested in PHP, see Bradley’s great tutorials, Learn PHP or Step By Steps.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 18th, 2009 at 4:00 am and is filed under March/April 2009 Issue, Rough Draft Newsletter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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