Php Tutorial : Chapter 1 . Introduction to PHP

What is PHP ? PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) is an open source server side scripting language . So what is a server side scripting language ? You must have seen some html/css code before by examining the source code of various sides . Now some of these pages are static i.e no matter who the user is , the page will always show the same content . PHP along with some database solution helps us in making web pages dynamic i.e we can show the same page with different data to different users . Example :- Facebook profile page . The basic outlook of the page is the same for all users , however the data that needs to be displayed is different for different users !! Now this cannot be achieved by using traditional html/css . For this we need a server-side scripting solution and a database which will store all the user information . So basically what php does is , it produces the html which will be displayed in the client side . Note that unlike javascript , which can make changes to the page after the page has loaded in the user's browser , php can't make any changes once the page has been sent . This is the primary difference between a client side scripting language (javascript in this case) and a server side scripting language .

Why php and not any other server side scripting language ?

To install php :-

1) For windows :- Download the latest wamp package from here .
2) For linux (in ubuntu) : - Go to the shell and type sudo apt-get install lamp-server^
P.s. DO NOT miss out the ^ after lamp-server .