Early era web developers with dynamic ambitions had little more than
server side includes in their toolbelts -- it was a dark era indeed.
The need for embedded server-parsed scripting languages was apparent,
and Microsoft went after this hunger with their
ASP, or Active Server Pages, technology.
The concept behind ASP, and all other embedded server-parsed languages,
is premised upon embedding programming code within the
HTML that makes up a web page. The web
server interprets and executes this code, replacing the code with its
results, and delivering the resulting web page to the browser. Popular
though ASP became, many developers continued wanting for a more stable
and less proprietary solution: enter
PHP, an open-source server-parsed
embedded scripting language.
In this introduction we'll take a look at programming with PHP 3, the
most popular version of PHP, although PHP 4 is just around the corner.
The art and science of computer programming is a much larger topic
than any one language, and cannot be the focus of this introduction --
while PHP is accessible to programming newcomers, it will be easiest
for those with even a small background in programming other languages
such as BASIC, Pascal, C,
JavaScript,
Perl, and so on.
