PHP Overview

Precisely, PHP is a very powerful server-side scripting language like ASP for developing dynamic web applications. Using PHP, you can build interactive and dynamic websites with ease. If you have some idea about the C language then learning PHP should be a fairly simple task for you.

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It is free; it is suitable for web development, it is efficient, it is widely used and it is considered to be the most powerful alternative to Microsoft’s ASP. PHP script can be embedded straight into the heart of html code just like ASP.

One of the reasons of the why PHP is getting more popular is that its syntax is very much similar to that of C and Perl. PHP is compatible with various web servers like Apache and the Microsoft’s IIS as well. All the PHP scripts are executed on the server (Apache, IIS etc) and it supports various databases like MySQL, Oracle, Solid, Generic ODBC etc; however, it is mostly used with MySQL. Another reason for the ever-increasing popularity of PHP is that it is free to download and use.

What does a PHP file contains is a common question asked by many PHP learners. A PHP file has an extension of .phtml, .php or .php3 and it may contain various HTML tags, texts and scripts. Although a .php file contains scripts but when it is returned to the browser, it is returned as a plain HTML file. We shall learn more about PHP in our coming sections.