What Is PHP?
PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a language that came out of the open source stable, with elements taken from C, Perl, and Java. Fast growing in popularity, PHP is an excellent partner to MySQL and competes with Perl, ASP, and other server-side languages.
Interactivity can be achieved using CGIs (Common Gateway Interfaces). These programs can be written in a number of languages, such as Perl and C (both of whose MySQL APIs you will study in later lessons). However, with CGIs, a program is purely a program and cannot be a Web page.
PHP allows you to embed lines of code within an HTML page. When the Web server receives a request for an HTML file containing PHP, it does not simply serve up the page to the user, but ...
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