ZDNet: Are You Being Served? An Introduction to PHP

“When I started writing this article, I promised myself I wouldn’t editorialize or evangelize the usage of PHP. Instead, I’d just write a nice little article about this cool server-side scripting language that’s currently used on over 1.4 million web servers. I wasn’t going to go on about the blazingly fast parsing engine in PHP4, or its database connectivity functions. I wasn’t going to discuss the XML support, Java servlet support, native session handling and IMAP functions. Most of all, I wasn’t planning to enter into the “open source vs. commercial software” debate, and tell you about the hard-working group of developers working day and night to add functionality and upgrades, based purely on user responses and requests.”

PHP can do anything you want, except sit on its head and spin. With a little on-the-fly image manipulation and DHTML, it can probably do that, too.

“But it would be just silly of me not to mention all of that. Since version 3 (we’re now to the first official release of version 4.0.0), PHP has proven to be a viable and stable solution for everything from personal to corporate to E-commerce web sites, and not just for me, but for thousands of developers worldwide….”

“PHP can do anything you want, except sit on its head and spin. With a little on-the-fly image manipulation and DHTML, it can probably do that, too. If you’re coming over to the PHP world from another language, I promise that you can pick it up in no time: the syntax borrows from Perl, C and Java, so if you have even the most basic understanding of programming languages, your first PHP project will be a breeze.”