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Overview of PHP language

Before you start writing your pages in PHP, you must first know a minimum of things about this great language.

PHP (officially, this acronym is a recursive acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor") is a general-purpose, open source, scripting language specifically designed for the development of web applications. It can be easily integrated into your HTML pages.

The PHP code that you will insert in your WEB pages will be spotted by a WEB server (if it is equipped with the PHP extension) that it will send it to PHP to interpret it (I speak well of interpretation and not of compilation).
For information note that PHP is supported by many web servers, including the famous Apache project.

Thanks to these portions of PHP code that you will insert into your WEB pages, PHP will allow you to quickly write dynamic content web pages.

Especially if it is coupled with a relational database server such as MySQL.

There is a difference with other CGI scripts written in other languages such as Perl or C: instead of writing a program with many lines of commands to generate an HTML page, with PHP, you write an HTML page with PHP code included inside to perform a specific action.
The PHP code is included between a start tag and an end tag that allow the web server to go into "PHP mode".

The knowledge of HTML code is strongly recommended, or even essential to start its first pages in PHP (this because PHP only generates HTML code and it is inconceivable to generate something that we do not control ).

You should also know that when you insert the smallest piece of PHP code in an HTML page, you will have to change the extension of this file to .php (in plain text: if you have a page named index.htm and you insert it PHP code, you will have to rename it to index.php).

Needs to start well

To get started, you need two things:

• a text editor to write your portions of code in PHP
• a development environment to test these portions of code

As for text editors, you can find dozens on the web, depending on your operating system and your various functional requirements.
To decide, you can consult sites comparing the many publishers.

For the development environment, if you do not want to complicate too much life is installing Apache, PHP and MySQL by hand, I advise you to use "packages" offering solutions ready for use.
In a few clicks, your environment will be installed and functional.