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PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page. Some PHP resources also refer to PHP as being short for
PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.
PHP is a widely-used, free, server-side scripting language for Web development. PHP is useful for creating dynamic,
interactive websites and can be embedded in HTML.
PHP syntax is very similar to Perl and C. PHP is often used together with Apache web servers with a variety of operating systems.
The main use of PHP code is for the web server to take input as PHP code and create web pages as output.
PHP files may contain text, HTML tags and scripts. These files are displayed in an Internet browser as plain HTML.
PHP files have a file extension of ".php", ".php3", or ".phtml"
PHP is commonly used with MySQL to produce dynamic web content. MySQL is database server that is free to
download and use.
As we've mentioned PHP helps produce dynamic web content.
So let's take a look at an example of dynamic web content.
Let's say that you have a database of products. If you only had ten or twenty products to display on a web site you
could easily update the products price and other details for each page when needed.
However, let's say that you have 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 products to display. To update 1,000 pages with new information would
be extremely time consuming if you did each page yourself.
This is where PHP comes into play. For example, you could create a .php file that would contain code that would retrieve information
from a product database and build a page dynamically. You would then have one page that can serve up
unique pages based on information stored in the database.
Rather than spending your time or hiring someone to change hundreds or thousands of website pages PHP gives you the power
to make instant changes across multiple website pages. Once the information is changed in the database it is immediately available
to your web site. This means your website content is as current as your database with no need to re-do multiple pages.
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