Introduction to PHP

What is PHP?

PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is actually a recursive initialism.

It is a general-purpose server side scripting language that is especially designed for web development.

Evolution of PHP

PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. He originally developed it for tracking visits to his online resume. It was earlier known as Personal Home Page.

Tools for creating PHP scripts

For creating PHP scripts you need to install a web server, a database server, a php environment and a text editor to write code.

You can use apache as web server and mysql as database server. Both are freey available. PHP environment can be created by downloading and installing PHP binaries for your computer from its website php.net.

For text editor, simple notepad can be used.

In the next step, lets install and set up the php environment on our computer.

Installing PHP and setting up the environment

For making this task easy, we are going to use WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP) server. WampServer is a windows web development environment which is bundled with apache, php and mysql. LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and XAMPP (X("cross platform"), Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl) can also be used.

So go ahead, visit the website www.wampserver.com, download the latest wampserver for your computer and install it. Hope you will install it successfully on your computer.

Next, lets learn whats the extension of php files.

Extension of PHP

PHP files have .php extension. So while saving your program make sure that you have saved it with proper file name ending with '.php'.