PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a server-side, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic web pages. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with some unique features as well. The goal of the language is simple. It is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly and easily.
PHP offers very good connectivity to many databases including MySQL, Informix, Solid, Oracle, Sybase , and PostgreSQL. The popular PHP-MySQL combination are both open-source products. It is available on almost every UNIX host. Since it is web-oriented, PHP also contains all the functions to do many things on the Internet, such as connecting to remote servers, setting cookies, checking email via POP3 or IMAP, url encoding , redirecting, and more.
On an HTML page, PHP code is enclosed within special PHP tags. When the visitor opens the page, the server processes the PHP code and then instead of sending the PHP code itself, it sends the output to the visitor's browser. Unlike JavaScript, you won't have to worry that someone might steal your PHP script.
PHP is a very simple language. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C except for dealing with the variable types. You don't need to think of the types of variables at all - you just work with their values, instead of their types. And you don't have to declare variables before you use them either.
As you can imagine there are many different PHP scripts available. Scripts for visitor logging, email, contact forms, calendars, and adsense are just a few of the many options. There are also some excellent sites that offer free PHP scripts. One particular site that is widely used is Free-PHP-Scripts.net. This website offers many free scripts as well as some featured ones that cost less than ten dollars.
If you are considering using PHP scripts on your website, you could be making a wise decision. The language is easy to learn and offers the ability to create dynamically generated web pages quickly. onkeyup="cntWords(this,document.postform.c)">
