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Introduction To PHP

PHP (recursive acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor") is a widely-used Open Source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.
What distinguishes PHP from something like client-side JavaScript is that the code is executed on the server. If you were to have a script similar to the above on your server, the client would receive the results of running that script, with no way of determining what the underlying code may be. You can even configure your web server to process all your HTML files with PHP, and then there's really no way that users can tell what you have up your sleeve. The best things in using PHP are that it is extremely simple for a newcomer, but offers many advanced features for a professional programmer. Don't be afraid reading the long list of PHP's features. You can jump in, in a short time, and start writing simple scripts in a few hours. Although PHP's development is focused on server-side scripting, you can do much more with it.

Basically Anything. PHP is focused on server-side scripting, so you can do anything other CGI programs can do, collect form data, generate dynamic page content, or send and receive cookies. and much more.
Php Scripts are used in three main fields... First there's Server-side scripting. You need three things to make this work. The PHP parser (CGI or server module), a web browser and a webserver. You have to run the webserver, with a connected and working PHP installation. You then can access the PHP program output with a web browser, viewing the PHP page through the server. Command line scripting. You can make a PHP script to run it without any server or browser. You only need the PHP parser to use it in this way. This is ideal for scripts regularly executed using cron or Task Scheduler. These scripts can also be used for simple text processing tasks. There's Writing client-side GUI applications. PHP is probably not the very best language to write windowing applications, but if you know PHP very well, and would like to use some advanced PHP features in your client-side applications you can also use PHP-GTK to write such programs also. You have the ability to write cross-platform applications this way. PHP-GTK is an simply a extension to PHP, not available in the main distribution. If you are interested in PHP-GTK, visit its own website.
PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, many Unix variants (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS, and probably others. PHP has also support for most of the web servers today. This includes Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Personal Web Server, Netscape and iPlanet servers, Oreilly Website Pro server, Caudium, Xitami, OmniHTTPd, and many others. For the majority of the servers PHP has a module, for the others supporting the CGI standard, PHP can work as a CGI processor.