Get Started in PHP

PHP, or Personal Home Page HyperText Preprocessor, is a server end programming language for creating dynamic webpages. PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, but now the first 'P' stands for PHP. Confusing?? Probably, but definitely helpful. It allows you to connect to a database, store data, print messages, and display variables. This is extremely helpful for creating a website. Almost every website that has a user login feature uses PHP. Also, one of the great things about PHP is that no one can steal your code! 

Example: If you right-click on a webpage, a drop-down menu appears. If you click on 'View Source', you will see a webpage with all the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on it. However, if you include PHP in that webpage, it won't show the code, only the result of the code.  If you tell the code to display the words 'Hello World' using PHP on a webpage, and you viewed the source, where the PHP was, you would just see the words 'Hello World', not the code. This is because PHP is a Server End code, meaning that it is compiled and executed on the web server, and the result is given to the webpage. Neat, huh?

Terminology:
~PHP: Personal-Home-Page HyperText Preprocessor
~Server End code: Code that is executed on the server and gives the result to the webpage
~Dynamic Webpages: Pages that interact with the user (a login form)

Step 1 What you need

The one downside to learning a server end language is that you need: a server. However, this is easily fixed! You can download a testing sever for free onto your computer. All you need to do is search for 'XAMPP', or goto www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html , and download the installer for the current version for your operating system. One of the cool things about XAMPP is that you can download it for Windows, Linux, Mac, or Solaris, so you don't need to worry about you operating system you have.

The other thing that you need is a PHP/HTML editor. If you are running Windows (Like I am), I would suggest Notepad ++. It's a free HTML editor that has many file extensions, including PHP, so you can edit the files you create easily. It also will highlight and color the code, depending on what file extensions you use, so you can detect mistakes.If you are running Mac OS X or Linux, Komodo Edit is good. I'm not sure what editors there are for Solaris, so if you do know, please leave me a comment.

For Windows users, Notepad works fine, although I don't like to program in it, because of the lack of syntax hi-lighting.