PHP

What Is PHP?

PHP is an open-source, server-side, HTML-embedded Web-scripting language that is compatible with all the major Web servers (most notably Apache). PHP enables you to embed code fragments in normal HTML pages—code that is interpreted as your pages are served up to users. PHP also serves as a “glue” language, making it easy to connect your Web pages to server-side databases.

Why PHP?

We devote nearly all of Chapter 1 to this question. The short answer is that it’s free, it’s open source, it’s full featured, it’s cross-platform, it’s stable, it’s fast, it’s clearly designed, it’s easy to learn, and it plays well with others.

What’s New in This Edition?

Although this book has a new title, it is in some sense a third edition. Previous versions were:

✦ PHP 4 Bible. Published in August 2000, covering PHP through version 4.0.

✦ PHP Bible, Second Edition. Published in September 2002, a significantly expanded version of the first edition, current through PHP 4.2.

Our initial plan for this book was to simply reorganize the second edition and bring it up to date with PHP5. We realized, however, that although the previous editions covered PHP/MySQL interaction, we had left readers in the dark about how to create and administer MySQL databases in the first place, and this led to many reader questions. As a result, we decided to beef up the coverage of MySQL and change the title.