If you need to embed dynamic text into otherwise unchanging web pages, you’ll find PHP extremely useful. It was designed for this and it excels at it. You can easily create your web page as normal, with boilerplate text for the parts that need to be changed per visitor. Then, once you’ve designed the page, you can replace the boilerplate with PHP code to display the changing parts of the page.
You’ll find that PHP is very portable: if it works on one server, it will usually work on any other server that has PHP installed. Most ISPs that provide server-side scripting provide PHP automatically.
PHP is also very useful for integrating web pages with databases. It has support for SQLite built in, and it often has support for MySQL, one of the most popular SQL database servers, pre-installed.
If you’ve already done some programming, the PHP scripting language resembles JavaScript, Java, and Perl. These languages all share a common ancestor, the C programming language. Of those, PHP is most different from JavaScript. PHP is a server-side scripting language. All of the “work” is done on the server. JavaScript usually runs on the client. It has little access to the information that the server has, and mediated access to information on the client. It can do lots of things on the client that PHP cannot. PHP, however, has full access to information that the server has. It only has information about the client that the client tells the server.
Because it is on the server, PHP cannot be modified by the client. While you cannot necessarily trust the information that the client gives to PHP, you can trust that your PHP is doing what you told it to do. Because PHP is on the server end, your PHP scripts can affect your server—such as by keeping an activity log or updating a database.
PHP can work with JavaScript to provide a combination of server-side and client-side functionality that will make your web pages more useful and your visitors happier.
