Introduction

PHP is a very popular free and open source software. When developing Dynamic and Interactive web sites, PHP is used as a powerful tool. After following these lessons we expect that you will be able to familiar with PHP.

Dynamic and Interactive web sites
This kind of websites can respond to the user's needs. User can Insert, Update or Delete data those are stored in a database. The web sites are connected to the databases. User can interact with the web site.

Static web sites
Users can not do anything other than reading text paragraphs and looking at graphics.

PHP
PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a server side scripting language. Also PHP is a free and open source software. That means PHP is free to use and source code is available for users to modify and distribute at no cost.

It is mentioned that PHP is a server side scripting language. For executing PHP script, we need a web server. Normally the computers that are used to access internet, are client computers. They are not the servers. Therefore we need to install a web server software in our computers to execute PHP scripts. We are going to use APACHE web server here. Also we need to install PHP and need to do configurations. It is easy to install one software that contains both PHP and APACHE. XAMPP is a software that contains APACHE,PHP and MYSQL.

X- Any operating system
A-APACHE
M-MYSQL
P-PHP
P-PERL

PHP script is executed in the server and the result is sent back to the browser in pure HTML form.