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Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript
book

Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript

by Robin Nixon
July 2009
Beginner content levelBeginner
526 pages
14h 24m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript

The Benefits of PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript

At the start of this chapter, I introduced the world of Web 1.0, but it wasn’t long before the rush was on to create Web 1.1, with the development of such browser enhancements as Java, JavaScript, JScript (Microsoft’s slight variant of JavaScript) and ActiveX. On the server side, progress was being made on the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) using scripting languages such as Perl (an alternative to the PHP language) and server-side scripting—inserting the contents of one file (or the output of a system call) into another one dynamically.

Once the dust had settled, three main technologies stood head and shoulders above the others. Although Perl was still a popular scripting language with a strong following, PHP’s simplicity and built-in links to the MySQL database program had earned it more than double the number of users. And JavaScript, which had become an essential part of the equation for dynamically manipulating CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) now took on the even more muscular task of handling the client side of the Ajax process. Under Ajax, web pages perform data handling and send requests to web servers in the background—without the web user being aware that this is going on.

No doubt the symbiotic nature of PHP and MySQL helped propel them both forward, but what attracted developers to them in the first place? The simple answer has to be the ease with which you can use them to quickly create dynamic elements on websites. MySQL is a fast ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596803605Supplemental ContentErrata Page