Introduction to PHP
PHP stands for PHP-Hypertext Pre-Processor, it is a server side scripting language for the Linux environment just like ASP is for the Windows environment. It’s basically a HTML embedded scripting language and interpreter that is treated same as an html page, they can be created and edited just like an html page and when downloaded through a browser it is also processed just like an HTML page. PHP is undoubtedly the most used server side processing language without any close competitors other than ASP.
One of the main reasons why webmasters use PHP more is because the syntax is similar to C and Perl programming language so they do not have to learn a new language altogether. The second reason why PHP is used more is because all the code is executed on the server itself the users cannot see the code, a big reason for businesses to choose PHP as it help them keep their code away and safe from the eyes of interested competitors.
PHP is the open source, free, alternative of Microsoft’s Active Server Page (ASP). While ASP operates only on Microsoft Windows servers (IIS), PHP performs on Linux servers (Apache). It is more or less similar to ASP as it is also used along with HTML within the page code to generate the final result. However, it can be used to draw the same results as a CGI script and can be used in combination with several different types of languages, making it the most widely usable language ever, the same cannot be done using ASP.
PHP is undoubtedly the most suitable language for a webmaster and the most widely used programming language for the web. If you’d like to learn more about PHP the W3C website has the most comprehensive database of tutorials along with easy to understand examples.
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