Lesson 20. Understanding Server-Side Processing

At this point, you've learned how to publish websites using HTML. This lesson takes things a step further and explains how to build dynamic websites using scripts on the server. Rather than trying to explain several of the platforms described in Lesson 19, "Taking Advantage of the Server," I'm focusing on PHP in this lesson. PHP is the most common scripting platform provided by web hosts, can be easily installed on your own computer, and is completely free. It's also easy to get started with. Even if you wind up developing your applications using some other scripting language, you can apply the principles you'll learn in this lesson to those languages.

In this Lesson

• How PHP works

• How to set up a PHP development environment

• The basics of the PHP language

• How to process form input

• Using PHP includes