Introduction About PHP
PHP is a powerful scripting language for creating dynamic websites. It has gained enormous popularity in the community as the free and efficient alternative to commercial competitors such as Microsoft’s ASP. PHP is distributed under a license that makes the source code available to anyone.
Modern dynamic websites demand server-side scripting that tailors the content toward the visitor and his or hers preferences. PHP allows its code to be embedded into html pages and offers rich scripting functionality that makes data processing fast and efficient. The extensive APIs for access to databases, XML, object layers such as COM, and much more, make PHP very a flexible platform for web development.
Syntax and naming of language elements are very similar to the highly popular languages Perl and C, which makes learning PHP convenient for the experienced programmer. PHP even offers object oriented programming for better modularity and reuse of code.
PHP is often used together with the popular web server Apache on various operating systems. It runs within the server process, which makes it fast. It also supports ISAPI and can be used with Microsoft’s IIS on Windows.
This PHP Quick Reference gives a comprehensive overview of the basics of PHP, covering important subjects such as control structures, operators, strings and string functions, arrays and array functions, predefined variables, I/O, cookies and sessions, and more.
For downloads and more information, please visit the official PHP site: http://www.php.net
