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>> Original Post @ KilerMedia.com <<

In what will be a new tutorial series here at TheGeekBlogs.com, we are going to teach you PHP!
In this first tutorial we ask the question, “What Is PHP?”

PHP is a reflective programming language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. PHP is used mainly in server-side scripting, but can be used from a command line interface or in standalone graphical applications. Textual User Interfaces can also be created using ncurses. PHP is a recursive initialism for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
The main implementation is produced by The PHP Group and released under the PHP License. This implementation serves to define a de facto standard for PHP, as there is no formal specification. The most recent version of PHP is 5.2.4, released on 30 August 2007. It is considered to be free software by the Free Software Foundation.

HISTORY:
PHP was written as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries in the C programming language by the Danish/Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage. Lerdorf initially created PHP to display his résumé and to collect certain data, such as how much traffic his page was receiving. Personal Home Page Tools was publicly released on 8 June 1995 after Lerdorf combined it with his own Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI (this release is considered PHP version 2).
Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two Israeli developers at the Technion IIT, rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language’s name to the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Public testing of PHP 3 began and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP’s core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999. They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel, which actively manages the development of PHP.

USAGE:
PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating Web pages as output. However, it can also be used for command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications. PHP can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. The PHP Group also provides the complete source code for users to build, customize and extend for their own use.
PHP primarily acts as a filter. The PHP program takes input from a file or stream containing text and special PHP instructions and outputs another stream of data for display.
Originally designed to create dynamic web pages, PHP’s principal focus is server-side scripting. While running the PHP parser with a web server and web browser, the PHP model can be compared to other server-side scripting languages such as Microsoft’s ASP.NET system, Sun Microsystems’ JavaServer Pages, mod_perl and the Ruby on Rails framework, as they all provide dynamic content to the client from a web server. To more directly compete with the “framework” approach taken by these systems, Zend is working on the Zend Framework - an emerging (as of June 2006) set of PHP building blocks and best practices; other PHP frameworks along the same lines include CakePHP, PRADO and Symfony.
The LAMP architecture has become popular in the Web industry as a way of deploying inexpensive, reliable, scalable, secure web applications. PHP is commonly used as the P in this bundle alongside Linux, Apache and MySQL, although the P can also refer to Python or Perl. PHP can be used with a large number of relational database management systems, runs on all of the most popular web servers and is available for many different operating systems. This flexibility means that PHP has a wide installation base across the Internet; over 19 million Internet domains are currently hosted on servers with PHP installed.

Examples of popular server-side PHP applications include phpBB, WordPress, MediaWiki, vBulletin, NATS, and MPA³.
Examples of popular PHP websites include FaceBook.com, LunarPages.com.

REQUIREMENTS:
Before you get knee deep in these tutorials you should ensure that you have the minimum requirements:

• 1. A web server (preferably Apache),
• 2. PHP installed on the server,
• 3. Ability to add/edit/delete php files on your server.

Ready to get into some code? You’ll have to wait for the next tutorial!

Categories: Development Tutorials, PHP, Tutorials, Web Development
Tags: PHP, tips, Tutorials