PHP

These days most professional commercial webites use PHP.
PHP has been in use for over 10 years and is now the most popular dynamic web programming language. When a website requires you to sign in with your username/password, vote in a poll, download or upload something, chances are PHP is being used. PHP is also often used for shopping carts on online stores.

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP as a language is close to the basic programming languages like C or even JAVA. But calling PHP a programming language would be a mistake since it was originally written in C and then developed into a sever technology by Rasmus Lerdorf. It has since become the most popular open source scripting language in the Internet world.

With PHP, users have many options with the variety of programming they can do. From the simple 'Hello World' script to ' Proxy Servers' to very detailed shopping cart systems. PHP's simplicity and maintainability separates this code from its competitors; JSP (Java Server Pages) and ASP of Microsoft.

This has lead to most of the Internet Web Space Providers, supplying their server space with Apache (Linux) so that their clients can work with PHP instead of WINDOWS based ASP. PHP being a derivative of C is associated with LINUX which also supplies the user with another useful companion of PHP; MySQL database server.

Apart from PHP's flexibility, it is also extremely stable since it uses Linux which is a modular operating system. This means it opens a new module for each and every function that you try to use. In the end, you really do not want to have a server which cannot support you for 24/7.

The most intriguing feature of PHP is that it can connect to MySQL database or SQL 2000 server using its own open source libraries developed for the users by the users. PHP directly interacts with the database bypassing this middle burden thereby giving you tremendous speed enhancements.

PHP is the basic tool for you to follow the path to become a web programmer and create your own, sophisticated, nicely coded, interactive internet pages. Use PHP if you want to be in total control of your server and want to know what really is going on.


PHP Tutorials - A good selection of PHP tutorials from phpfreaks.com. Here you will find a large amount of step-by-step walk throughs and tutorials written by PHP Freaks authors!

PHP Resource - PHPBuilder.com, the resource for PHP tutorials, templates, PHP manuals, content management systems, scripts, classes and more for the PHP developer.

PHP Scripts - PHP Scripts for developers and programmers both free and commercial.

Connecting to a MySQL Database with PHP - So you have a MySQL database but need to pull the information in to your php pages? This short tutorial will teach you how to connect to your MySQL Database.

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