Introduction to PHP

So what can it do
Frankly speaking PHP is a complete programming language and you can do almost anything with it, but mostly PHP is used with web-based programming and one of its most powerful feature is database access. PHP can work with over 19 different types of databases! PHP can also communicate with other server-side languages such as Java and use COM interfaces.

Mostly websites use the combination of PHP an MySQL database, MySQL is an industrial strength database PHP has inbuilt support for MySQL database, but you can easily use PHP with Microsoft Access, MS-SQL Server, Oracle and other ODBC compliant databases.

How did PHP start?
Prior to PHP programmers uses to use Perl extensively to make dynamic websites but Perl was not that easy to learn as a result, there was a need of alternative server-side scripting languages which had a shorter learning curve and were easier to work with PHP was thus born.

PHP was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf as a means of monitoring page views for his online resume, and slowly started making a mark when PHP/FI was released in mid-1995, PHP has matured a lot since its early days and is now one of the most powerful scripting languages for building dynamic web sites and runs on Unix, Linux and Windows.


What do I need to know to learn PHP
To work with PHP you need to know HTML (not necessary) but we are going to generate dynamic web pages with PHP so you need to know some basics of HTML, don't you worry PHP is easy to learn you can get a good grasp on PHP only in a couple of weeks!

The goal of PHPbuddy.com is to teach you the basics of PHP so that you can create your own dynamic websites!

Before you can work with PHP you need to install PHP on your computer if you haven’t installed PHP yet, now is a good time to install PHP.