PHP articles, tutorials and tips

The first time I heard about PHP was sometime in June of 2001. A reader (now, my pal) Nicholas Niehoff sent me an email with information about F2S (a free webhosting service that supported everything including PHP & MySQL).

Anyway, at the time I was still struggling with perl, CGI, Visual Basic, JavaScript and ASP, so looking at their features, I was thinking to myself, "What the #@&$ is PHP?".

Well, it's similar to perl/CGI, ASP, JSP and the host of other server-side scripting languages you can find today. Meaning, you can create dynamic content (and use databases e.g. MySQL) for your web pages using scripts not so different from these other programming languages I mentioned before. Also, that these pages normally have a .phtml, .php3 or .php extension.

Also, strangely, 2 different sources on the Net claim that the name PHP is an abbreviation for either Personal Home Pages or PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. Looks like it's both if you ask me.

My first stop in learning about PHP on the Net was here.

After nearly one year of experimenting with perl, ASP and PHP, it's so obvious what I preferred using in the end - and that should tell you a lot! It's the easiest to learn (cause I have a very short attention span) and yet it's as powerful as the rest. Some hardcore PHP coders even claim that it's more efficient than the rest!

Now comes the other reason why PHP is so easy to pickup. You can set your Windows PC to run PHP and MySQL with relative ease - and once you got all of them setup on your PC together with the Apache Web Server, you can code, test and learn till there's nothing more to learn... yeah right!

IF you think I am trying to sell you something, then you're in for another surprise; all the software I list below is FREE and you can download it off the Internet right now.

Go ahead, do yourself a favour and get some PHP in your blood... Download the following software and go get yourself a decent book in PHP. Believe me, you'll thank me for it...

• Apache
• PHP
• MySQL
• Activeperl (in case you need to do some perl stuff)

I am currently preparing my own notes on how to set these software up on a PC but they're not completed yet so -

You should read these pages in the meantime.