Chapter 11. Programming for the Web

PHP (PHP Hypertext Processor) is an extremely popular open-source scripting language most often used on the Web. Unlike the ECMAScript (formerly known as JavaScript) that runs in your Web browser after the page loads, PHP runs on the server before (or while) servicing your request. A large library of add-ons lets PHP work with databases, compression schemes, email and news servers, graphics files, XML, and pretty much anything else you'd ever need to write powerful and interesting Web-based applications.

In this chapter, we'll see how to install and configure PHP (including how to hook up the PHP module for Apache), and we'll take a look at a couple of simple PHP scripts to get you started in the wonderful world of Web scripting.