PHP lessons

PHP is a general –  purpose scripting language used for developing static and dynamic websites and web applications. Originally,  PHP  stood for  Personal Home  Page , but now it stands for  Hypertext Preprocessor . PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. The language is currently maintained by the PHP Development Team.

There are over 20 million websites on the internet developed using PHP. It has been used to create social networks  (Facebook, Digg, YouTube) , content management systems  (WordPress, Joomla)  , and other projects  (Wikipedia, Yahoo) .

Advantages of PHP

   Free and open source – there is no licensing fee to use PHP for software development.

   Cross-platform—it’s platform-independent. PHP runs on most operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and macOS.

   Simplicity – PHP is relatively easy to learn and get started with for beginners.

   Stability – PHP has been around for many years.

   Has a large number of libraries.

   PHP’s built-in database connectivity modules help reduce the hassle and time required to develop web applications.

   Community Support – PHP has an active online community that will help you if you run into a problem.

   It is a server-side scripting language, meaning that you only need to install it on the server, and clients (users) requesting resources from the server do not need to have PHP installed; just a web browser will suffice.

   PHP has built-in support for working with MySQL, and can also work with other database management systems (e.g., PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, etc.).

   PHP is supported by popular web servers such as Nginx, OpenBSD, and Apache. Some cloud environments also support PHP, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS.

PHP is quite flexible; it is not limited to just processing HTML, but has built-in support for creating and processing PDF, GIF, JPEG, and PNG    file formats.

Introduction