Welcome to Part 2 of the PHP lessons.
In the previous lesson, we talked about how to get started with PHP, setting up a local environment to develop in PHP. We also talked about Variables and how they can be very useful when developing.
Just to refresh yourself up, the way we write a variable is like so:
$myVariable = "This is some fancy text";
echo $myVariable;
?>
What is php?
PHP is a powerful programming language for programmers to add interactivity to web pages, making them dynamic. What does “dynamic” mean? Simply “not static”! It may seem strange, but this is exactly what it is. Traditionally, web pages were “static”, coded in HTML. Nowadays, these pages are filled contents that change over time. Think about a blog, if you’re starting one then get managed wordpress hosting with knownhost. Aren’t new articles added from time to time? Well in the past, someone had to go edit a webpage, add code and add the article there manually. Nowadays, the article is pulled from a database, and dynamically added to a page as it is posted. That’s what PHP does: generating pages on the fly with content, with the help of HTML and other languages of course.
PHP is free (as in no cash needed, and open source – you can download and view the PHP source code) and is among the most popular programming languages used for Website Developement, to do processing.
What does PHP stands for?
PHP means: Hypertext Pre-Processor (HP, right? It’s a recursive acronym! It originally meant, Personal Home Page). It is a server side language and are executed on a server (Not on a local machine like Javascript, HTML and CSS). PHP can interact with Many databases out there such as MySql, Oracle, etc. To fully make use of PHP, a minimum knowledge of HTML is required, as well as some basic CSS if you wish to make things look nicer, but CSS is not directly required.