Sams Teach Yourself MySQL in 21 Days, Second Edition

A Quick Guide to PHP

Here's a guide to the PHP language, designed to get you started quickly. To keep this guide lightweight, this section assumes that you are comfortable with the principles of programming in general and that you can hand-code simple HTML pages.

You will look at a useful but nonexhaustive set of PHP syntax—there's much more than can be included here! Nevertheless, you should be able to build powerful scripts after digesting today's lesson.

To get the most out of this guide, you should have at least PHP version 4.1. The general principles covered apply to PHP from version 3 onward, and we've noted wherever something has only been introduced in version 4. But the later versions of PHP contain much more functionality and have inherently ...