June 2002
Intermediate to advanced
384 pages
7h 53m
English
Let’s move on to PHP, easily my favorite web development language. This section provides a brief overview of PHP’s history, capabilities, and applications.
PHP (the name actually is a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Pre-Processor—you know how geeks are!) began life as a glint in the eye of Rasmus Lerdorf in late 1994. (For the full story, visit http://www.php.net/manual/phpfi2.php#history.) Rasmus needed a tool to log visitors to his personal web page; his solution, using a C wrapper and special tags embedded into the HTML code, became the first version of PHP.
PHP hit the big time between 1997 and 2000 as more and more sites adopted it. The release of PHP 4.0 in late 2000 only served to widen its fan base. As a complete rewrite of ...