 |
| PHP5 and MySQL ebook |
Although we’re biased, we believe that the PHP Web-scripting language is the hands-down winner in its niche—by far the easiest and most flexible server-side tool for getting great Web
sites up and running in a hurry. Although millions of Web programmers worldwide could be wrong, in this particular case, they’re not. MySQL is the most popular open-source database platform, and it is the first choice of many for creating database-backed PHP-driven Web sites As we write this, PHP5 is in its third beta version, and PHP has continued to grow in reach,
adoption, and features since we wrote the first two versions of this book.
What Is PHP?
PHP is an open-source, server-side, HTML-embedded Web-scripting language that is compatible with all the major Web servers (most notably Apache). PHP enables you to embed code fragments in normal HTML pages—code that is interpreted as your pages are served up to users. PHP also serves as a “glue” language, making it easy to connect your Web pages to
server-side databases.