Introducing PHP

The purpose of this chapter is to bring you up to speed on the development of PHP, where it's at now, and the reasons for programming with it. Towards the end of the chapter, you'll see your first PHP code as you start writing your first scripts.

Unless you find history fascinating, I recommend you skip directly here.

Chapter contents

  1. 2.1. History
    1. 2.1.1. Background
    2. 2.1.2. Early versions of PHP
    3. 2.1.3. Current release
    4. 2.1.4. Upgrading from PHP 3
    5. 2.1.5. Upgrading from PHP 4
    6. 2.1.6. The creators of PHP
    7. 2.1.7. The Zend Relationship
  2. 2.2. Advantages of PHP
    1. 2.2.1. The HTML relationship
    2. 2.2.2. Interpreting vs. Compiling
    3. 2.2.3. Output Control
    4. 2.2.4. Performance
    5. 2.2.5. Competing Languages
    6. 2.2.6. When to use PHP
    7. 2.2.7. When not to use PHP
    8. 2.2.8. Selling PHP to your boss
  3. 2.3. Extending PHP
  4. 2.4. PEAR
  5. 2.5. Running PHP scripts
  6. 2.6. How PHP is written
    1. 2.6.1. Whitespace
    2. 2.6.2. Escape sequences
    3. 2.6.3. Heredoc
    4. 2.6.4. Brief introduction to variable types
    5. 2.6.5. Code blocks
    6. 2.6.6. Opening and closing code islands
    7. 2.6.7. Comments
    8. 2.6.8. Conditional statements
    9. 2.6.9. Case switching
    10. 2.6.10. Loops
    11. 2.6.11. Infinite loops
    12. 2.6.12. Special loop keywords
    13. 2.6.13. Loops within loops
    14. 2.6.14. Mixed-mode processing
    15. 2.6.15. Including other files
  7. 2.7. Abnormal script termination
  8. 2.8. Editing your PHP configuration
  9. 2.9. Summary
  10. 2.10. Exercises
  11. 2.11. Further reading
  12. 2.12. Next chapter

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