What is PHP and Why Should I Care?

One of the first things most people want to know about PHP is what the initials stand for. Then they wish they had never asked. Officially, PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is an ugly name that gives the impression that it is strictly for nerds or propellerheads. Nothing could be further from the truth.

PHP is a scripting language that brings websites to life in the following ways:

* Sending feedback from your website directly to your mailbox

* Sending email with attachments

* Uploading files to a web page

* Watermarking images

* Generating thumbnails from larger images

* Displaying and updating information dynamically

* Using a database to display and store information

* Making websites searchable

* And much more . . .

PHP is easy to learn, it is platform-neutral, so the same code runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux; and all the software you need to develop with PHP is open source and therefore free. There was a brief debate on the PHP General mailing list (http://news.php.net/ php.general) in early 2006 about changing what PHP stands for. Small wonder, then, that it drew the comment that people who use PHP are Positively Happy People.

PHP started out as Personal Home Page in 1995, but it was decided to change the name a couple of years later, as it was felt that Personal Home Page sounded like something for hobbyists, and did not do justice to the range of sophisticated features that had been added. Since then, PHP has developed even further, adding extensive support for objectoriented programming (OOP) in PHP 5. One of the language’s great attractions, though, is that it remains true to its roots. You can start writing useful scripts very quickly without the need to learn lots of theory, yet be confident in the knowledge that you are using a technology with the capability to develop industrial-strength applications. Although PHP supports OOP, it is not an object-oriented language.

Make no mistake, though. Using simple techniques does not mean the solutions you will find in these pages are not powerful. They are.


Embracing the power of code
How hard is PHP to use and learn?
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