Beginning Programming in 24 Hours, Sams Teach Yourself, Third Edition

Hour 18. Scripting with PHP

In 1995, a programmer named Rasmus Lerdorf created a set of scripts to help him manage some basic tasks within his own personal website, specifically around the use of HTML form data. He called this bundle of scripts “Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter” or PHP/FI. Over the next few years, and with the help of some more developers—Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans—PHP/FI turned into the processing module we know today as PHP (which is now a recursive acronym that stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”). From its humble beginnings as a server-side scripting language used for common tasks such as form handling and database interactions, PHP has grown in popularity such that more than 250 million websites use PHP in some ...