BEFORE PHP

Before you can take advantage of PHP extensive capabilities, it must be installed and available on the server hosting your website. Here's some good news! PHP is platform friendly. It runs on Windows, Linux and many flavors of UNIX, so the chances are it can be installed on your server if it's not already there. Because of its popularity most hosting companies these days offer support for PHP. If you're not sure about yours, call and ask them. If they don't support it, ask them why not, then choose another host!

Other server side languages, competitors if you like, include PERL, ASP (Active Server Pages) (&ASP.Net), JSP (Java Server Pages), Alaire's Cold Fusion and others. PHP has some advantages over its competitors. It's free - a tough price to beat! It's very efficient, making it capable of handling millions of daily hits on one inexpensive server (check out the benchmarks on http://www.Zend.com ) It's portable, meaning that it's easily moved from one platform to another (it's not identical on Windows and Unix/Linux, but it's very close - there would be only a few things to be changed.) It integrates with a variety of Database Management Systems (DBMS) including MySQL, which is also free! The list of DBMS is quite extensive and includes support for any systems that provides an Open Database Connectivity Standard (ODBC) driver, as most do.

Another big advantage of PHP is that it's easy to learn. That's what we're all about here. As previously mentioned, this introductory piece is to lead you into a new tutorial series that will provide a foundation for you to begin using PHP. We will be covering the basics of the language and providing some usable examples. In addition, we will be guiding you to some resources that you can use to increase the depth of your understanding of PHP and to expand the range of things you can accomplish with it. Gone are the days of the old static web page (well, almost!) Welcome to the dynamic world of interactivity and database connectivity on the Web!