In Picking Up Perl, Bradley Kuhn cites a saying from the Perl community which says, "Perl promotes laziness, impatience and hubris." He explains how lazy programmers don't want to write the same routines repeatedly so they design their code to be reusable as much as possible. Impatient programmers write efficient programs to do work for them and programmers with pride write clean, readable code and share it with others. The PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) brings this philosophy to PHP
PHP (Hypertext Pre-Processor) is a scripting language. One common mistake made by beginners to programming is to confuse PHP and HTML. HTML is the code which a browser interprets, while PHP is the code which creates HTML. PHP can create HTML. If you do not know basic HTML, then do not read any further.
To identify PHP code you must give the file a .php extension. This tells the web server to send these files to the PHP engine, so that they can be interpreted/compiled. Beyond giving them a .php extension you must also identify PHP code by surrounding it in the following tags:
Before setting a variable it might help to know what one actually is. A variable is basically a piece of memory which has a name and holds a 'value'. Open up your favourite HTML/PHP text editor, and type the text below.
This tutorial shows you how to use two open source, cross-platform tools for creating a dynamic Web site: PHP and MySQL. When we are finished, you will know how dynamic sites work and how they serve the content, and you will be ready to serve your own dynamic content from your site.
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