PHP, what is it?
I started doing some side research on my own about php. What I found so far is, PHP is installed on over 20 million websites and 1 million web servers. It is a server side scripting language for making dynamic and interactive Web pages. It’s used for controling databases such as MySQL, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Solid, PostgreSQL, Generic ODBC. PHP files can contain text, HTML tags and scripts and it’s files are returned to the browser as plain HTML.
PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
The Wc3 describes PHP as-
- PHP is a server-side scripting language, like ASP
- PHP scripts are executed on the server
- PHP supports many databases (MySQL, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Solid, PostgreSQL, Generic ODBC, etc.)
- PHP is an open source software
- PHP is free to download and use
PHP installs onto your website’s server, and is cross platform compatible. What you do is write scripts to be installed on the server, then when someone visits your site, these scripts control what information is presented in a dynamic fashion. In short, what PHP can do is convert a static website that has content that has to be changed by hand into a dynamic one that can display content based on any criteria you can think of. From What I’ve been reading, PHP is a loosely typed language, variable do not have to be declared like in more strict programing languages.
PHP files can contain text, HTML tags and scripts. One could create PHP files with nothing more than notepad, providing your server supports it, and it’s most likely it does. So there’s what PHP is, next step is getting into the nuts and bolts of it and writing scripts. We’ll see how that goes….
Yes yes, dynamic content is wonderful. PHP is somewhat messy as a programming language but is fairly easy. There’s a book that I liked at the Tri-C library there to learn it, I believe by Kevin Yank, I forget what it was called. It seemed to step through it in a way that I found easy to understand, though I did already have PHP and programming experience before reading it. If you are planning on learning PHP fairly in-depth, you’ll probably want to look at object oriented approaches, the model-view-controller paradigm, and DRY practices, among other popular trends.
There are of course a whole lot of opensource PHP projects already built. For some things there are so many that it is hard to narrow down to the one that best fits your needs. There are frameworks available, such as CakePHP, that can make it easier to build your own projects, though you do have to learn how to work with them.
Thanks, I have to check out that book. The concepts seem easy enough to me, I’m just not a natural programmer so actually writing code is always a little hard for me.
Good info. You may also want to consider taking the Actionscript class; it is Object oriented now (3.0) and it may help to have some guidance. Also, you can earn some good $$!