Introduction to PHP and its basic syntax

Hi friends, today we will see introduction to PHP and its basic syntax. Prerequisite to understand this blog is to read my previous blog on XAMPP server.

PHP is the recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor. PHP was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf and now it is maintained by The PHP Group. It is an open source server side scripting language. Pre-requisite for learning PHP is HTML. PHP code can be embedded inside HTML code. PHP is mainly used for web development. Everything in PHP is enclosed in angle brackets

“<?php ……………..?> “.

PHP allows writing web pages which are dynamically generated. When a user visits any of the website which has PHP webpage’s, then a web server processes the PHP code and translate it into HTML page and then send to the requesting client.

PHP’s syntax is very similar to C, Perl, Java beside this PHP code can also contains tags.

PHP code is:

<?php

------

------

?>

PHP code must be saved with the .php extension. We will now see a simple Hello World program written in PHP which will give us basic understanding about the syntax of PHP that we must use.

This simple code is saved in the xampp directory where the path is C:\xampp\htdocs\hello_world.php. We have seen xampp in our previous blog, so start apache server there. And then go to web browser and type localhost/Hello_World.php.

Output:

There are several things to learn from this simple code written above. As we can see, code which is red in colour is the starting and end point of php code. Everything will be inside this code always. Now see line 2, echo is used to print the statement that follows, be careful here to end the statement with semicolon (;).

This is the first blog on PHP and in coming weeks we will learn more about this dynamic language.