PHP Tutorial

This tutorial will teach you all about PHP and PHP 5 from very basic for beginner to advance.

What is PHP ?

PHP is a scripting language, supports object oriented feature. PHP is used to create dynamic web pages or web applications.

PHP can be deployed on array Web server, operating system or platform (such as Windows, Unix, Linux etc). PHP also supports various databases (such as Oracle, MySQL, Informix, and Sybase).

You can use PHP by embedding PHP scripts in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Languages) pages. You can integrate PHP with AJAX in creating Web applications that run extremely fast on the latest versions of browsers.

What is a PHP File ?

PHP file can consists of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP code.

PHP File extensions

You can save a PHP file with one of the following extensions :

.php
.php3
.phtml
.ph3
.ph4
.php5
.ph5

Characteristics of PHP

Here are the characteristics of PHP:

PHP is simple
PHP is secure
PHP is efficient
PHP is flexible
PHP is familiar

What to Learn before PHP ?

Before start learning PHP, you must have basic understanding on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

What PHP can Do ?

PHP can do a lot of task such as outputting images, files, etc. PHP also helps to upload files to the server.

Why to Learn PHP ?

Programmer loves PHP because of these reasons:

runs on various platform
supports wide range of databases
compatible with almost all servers
runs efficiently on server side

Here is a simple PHP example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
   <title>PHP and PHP5 Tutorial</title>
</head>
<body>

<?php
   echo "<h1>PHP and PHP 5 Tutorial</h1>";
   echo "You are Learning PHP and PHP 5 at codescracker.com<br>";
   echo "PHP is fun!. You will enjoy learning PHP.<br>";
?> 

</body>
</html>

To know how to save and run the above PHP example, refer to PHP Environment Setup to understand how to implement PHP in your computer system step by step.

Save the above file with .php extension and open it in your browser, the web page will look like:

Here is one more PHP example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
   <title>PHP and PHP5 Tutorial</title>
</head>
<body>

<?php
   $str1 = "PHP and PHP5 Tutorial";
   $str2 = "codescracker.com";

   echo "<h1>$str1</h1>";
   echo "You are Learning PHP and PHP 5 at $str2";
?>

</body>
</html>

Here is the output of this PHP example:

You will learn all about PHP and PHP 5 one by one in this tutorial series.

Audience

This PHP tutorial series is designed and developed by professional PHP programmer and will help to all those PHP lover who are interested to practice and learn PHP with its tutorial and codes.

Here we have included a lot of PHP codes in each and every chapter where required with its output and explanation.

Therefore, you can follow this PHP tutorial to get deep understanding about PHP.

Prerequisites

Before start learning PHP, you must have some prior knowledge about basic computer skills and HTML.

If you have some prior knowledge of how to program, then it becomes too easy to learn PHP.