[quote style=boxed float=right]PHP is one of the most commonly used server-side scripting languages, PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page. It was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 to track the visitors to his website.[/quote]We are going to start an interesting series on this blog. That would help the users to learn PHP, an easier and quicker way. This article is the first piece of this series. Our first Chapter is ‘ PHP Introduction and Basics ‘, in this chapter we will discuss, the origin and history of PHP and how it became so popular over the web.
[button color=red]Topic 1[/button] A basic introduction to PHP a web programming language.
[quote style=boxed float=right]Almost 70% of the total websites on the internet are powered by PHP. Some of the prominent examples are, Facebook, and Open source CMS like WordPress, and Joomla.[/quote]PHP is one of the most commonly used server-side scripting languages, PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page. It was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 to track the visitors to his website. Later, as the PHP grew and got widely used in professional web applications, the PHP meaning were changed to ‘ Hypertext Preprocessor ‘. The new definition means, that PHP is a language that handles the data, before it becomes HTML.
I will discuss it later, how PHP works and handles the data. However you should know, that all PHP code after it is processed by the server, is rendered as HTML to the end-user. Which means, If you go to any website written in PHP, and see its ‘source code’ you would only notice HTML. For instance, this very website runs on WordPress which is written in PHP. If you view the source code of it, you would only notice HTML markup and not the PHP code. [hr]
[box]Before we get started, I don’t want you to believe in any delusions, While PHP is one of the easiest programming languages to learn, yet learning programming itself, is not a pretty easy task. It requires a lot of dedication, hard work, and pain-taking. [/box][hr]
[button color=red]Topic 2[/button] What is a server-side technology
As mentioned above, PHP is a server-side scripting language, which means, everything PHP does takes place on the website server rather than a client. Web server is a computer, where the website is hosted and is accessed to retrive a webpage. And a client computer is which retrieves a webpage or displays the webpage, used by the reader of a website or an internet user. Almost all of the modern web hosts have PHP pre-installed. In addition to this, you can install PHP on your own Windows or Mac computer. We would try to cover Local PHP installation in another tutorial. To sum it up, to view a PHP website, a user or reader, doesn’t need to have PHP installed on his/her computer. Since PHP runs on the web server of the website. Therefore it’s called server-side scripting language.
[box type="note"]For complete list of PHP Tutorials and Topics, Click here.[/box]
[box type=note]Recommended: PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide (4th Edition)[/box]
