Chapter 1. Welcome to PHP

Hey, welcome to PHP For Teens. I’m really glad you picked up this book, and I want to let you know that you are in for a great ride. PHP, while easy to learn, is also an incredibly powerful and useful language, and this book will teach you everything you need to know to make some seriously dynamic web sites.

So what does PHP actually mean? PHP itself stands for PHP: Hypertext processor—seriously. Seems kind of crazy, because the name itself is part of the acronym, like it keeps going on and on forever! PHP is also a current programming language that is often used on modern web sites and development applications. PHP is extendible, strong, and works with many external utilities. PHP is also pretty simple to learn. It is called a high-level language, which means that it is between human language (English) and machine code (0s and 1s). Because of this, you can easily understand it and write it almost like normal writing, but it is also strong enough to do some seriously complex things.

So what can you actually do with PHP? You can make the Internet an interactive experience by creating forms that people can fill out and submit and then deal with the data however you like. For example, a visitor can email comments to a webmaster, or post comments on site, or join a forum. PHP really makes the Internet more usable.

To use this book, you only need a rudimentary knowledge of how to design a web site. You need no programming background, but if you have done any programming before, you will understand the language much more quickly. Infact, even if you have never developed a web site of any kind before, you will pick up everything you need to know as we go along.

In this chapter, we are going to go ahead and install PHP. Installing PHP takes two steps. First, you need to install a web server and second, you need to install PHP as a part of the web server. Fortunately, both of these parts are free and on the CD included in the back of this book. The specific installation steps are different depending on whether you are installing on a Mac or a PC. Because most readers will be using a PC, I will explain in depth how to install it on Windows machines. Then I’ll give a few hints on how to install it for Macs.