Use That PHP

What’s PHP?

PHP is a server side programming language that allows web developers and programmers to write complex scripts to make dynamic functions occur on otherwise simple HTML files.

PHP is the most popular and widely used server side scripting language in the world and is a recursive acronym for Hypertext Pre Processor, and tends to be a very secure and stable language to build and maintain websites with.

PHP’s Origin

Originally created by Danish programmer Rasmus Lerdoff in 1995, PHP’s purity and simplicity of operation makes the language easy to learn. This has made PHP very popular among developers, who embrace Open Source technology to make scripts better and more widely available.

If you Google any function you want a website to perform, you find dozens if not hundreds of PHP versions of the function that you can implement into your code base.

Real World Examples

So, theory is one thing, real world examples are something else.

Take for example today’s real estate market. With PHP, a company can show how much a house will cost per month by demonstrating how much the mortgage, interest, insurance, and taxes will be according to the advertised list price of the home.

A visitor simply puts in the amount of money they want to put down as a down payment, and the website instantly shows the average monthly payments.

Finally, PHP is typically used in what is called the LAMP model. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Linux is the software that runs the computer where your Apache web server is located, which processes PHP functions that likewise process content from a MySQL database.

Give It A Try

Anyone interested in learning PHP should consider the W3C Schools and the PHP repository.

Happy coding!