An Introduction to PHP - Tutorial Entry / Learn By Doing

// Tutorials / An Introduction to PHP

Posted The: 03/04/2008 - AT: 8:47

PHP is a serverside programming language, which is used to preprocess data such as:

text
html
css

Note: PHP is not a replacement for html or css, instead it is used togetter, to create "dynamic" websites. It is also used to make calculations, and take decisions if a given condition is met.

How it works

You either need your own server such as Apache, with php installed. Or a host which has support for PHP on their server.

I would suggest that beginners simply buy a domainname, and some hosting space, an example of such a host would be one.com.

Your First Page

Most examples will start out with the build-in function called "echo", as will this. Lets start by outputting some text to the browser, using echo.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en">

  <head>
    <!--This is a HTML comment-->
  <title>My first Website</title>
  </head>

  <body>
<?php
  echo '<p>My first Website.</p>';
?>
    <!--This is a HTML comment-->
  </body>

</html>

As seen in the above example, we start by telling the server that we are going to write php. Every server which has support for php understand, "<?php" as start tag, and "?>" as end tag. You can also use the echo function to output the whole page, as seen below.

<?php
  echo '<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en">

  <head>
    <!--This is a HTML comment-->
  <title>My first Website</title>
  </head>

  <body>
    <p>My first Website.</p>
    <!--This is a HTML comment-->
  </body>

</html>';
?>

The above isn't really useful, so lets start using php for some useful tasks in the next few tutorials.