27.3. PHP–An Introduction
PHP is short for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. PHP processes hypertext (that is, HTML web pages) before they leave the web server. This allows you to add dynamic content to pages while at the same time making that content available to users with all types of browsers. PHP is an interpreted programming language, like Perl.
With PHP you can do almost anything. You can connect to any thing that you would want to on the command line, create interactive pages, PDF files and images and connect to database, LDAP and email servers.
Much of PHP’s syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web ...
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