Up until
recently, scripting on the internet was something which very few
people even attempted, let alone mastered. Recently though, more and
more people have been building their own websites and scripting
languages have become more important. Because of this, scripting
languages are becoming easier to learn and PHP is one of the easiest
and most powerful yet. PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor and is
a server-side language. This means that the script is run on your
web server, not on the user's browser, so you do not need to worry
about compatibility issues. PHP is relatively new (compared to
languages such as Perl (CGI) and Java) but is quickly becoming one
of the most popular scripting languages on the internet.
You may be wondering why you should choose PHP over other languages
such as Perl or even why you should learn a scripting language at
all. I will deal with learning scripting languages first. Learning a
scripting language, or even understanding one, can open up huge new
possibilities for your website. Although you can download pre-made
scripts from sites like Hotscripts, these will often contain
advertising for the author or will not do exactly what you want.
With an understanding of a scripting language you can easily edit
these scripts to do what you want, or even create your own scripts.
(Click
here for definition source).
