PHP

A popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development. Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

PHP, which stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. Its syntax draws upon C, Java, and Perl, and is easy to learn. The main goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated web pages quickly, but you can do much more with PHP.

Instead of lots of commands to output HTML (as seen in C or Perl), PHP pages contain HTML with embedded code that does something (in this case, output Hi, I'm a PHP script!). The PHP code is enclosed in special start and end processing instructions <?php and ?> that allow jumping in and out of "PHP mode."

What distinguishes PHP from something like client-side JavaScript is that the code is executed on the server, generating HTML which is then sent to the client. The client would receive the results of running that script, but would not know what the underlying code was. A web server can even be configured to process all HTML files with PHP, and then there's no way that users can tell that PHP is being used.

The best part about using PHP is that it is extremely simple for a newcomer, but offers many advanced features for a professional programmer. Don't be afraid to read the long list of PHP's features. With PHP, almost anyone can get up and running and be writing simple scripts in no time at all.

Although PHP's development is focused on server-side scripting, much more can be done with it.