What You ll Need

I l @ ve RuBoard

What You'll Need

The most important requirement for working with PHP ”since it is a server-side scripting language ”is access to a PHP-enabled server. Considering PHP's popularity, it is most likely that your ISP (Internet Service Provider) or Web host has this option available to you on their servers. To be sure, you will need to contact them to see what technology they support. As of this writing, over one thousand ISPs and Web hosts provide PHP support (Figure i.5).

Figure i.5. Through PHP's home page (Figure i.1) or directly you can access http://hosts.php.net, a site where you can search through the ISP's who offer PHP on their servers.

The other option you have is to install PHP on your own server ”commonly just a machine running Windows NT or Linux, with the necessary Web server application installed. (For example, Apache is a free Web serving application for Unix and NT systems, or you could use Personal Web Sharing with Windows.) Brief information on installing PHP is available in Appendix A, Installation and Configuration. If you are up to the task of using your own PHP-installed server, you can take some consolation in knowing that PHP is available for free from the PHP Web site (www.php.net) and comes in easy-to-install packages.

The second requirement is almost a given ”that you have some sort of text editor on your computer. NotePad, WordPad, SimpleText, and similar freeware applications are all sufficient for your purposes, while BBEdit, WordPerfect, Word, and other commercial applications offer more features that you may appreciate. If you are accustomed to using a graphical interface (also referred to as WYSIWYG ”What You See Is What You Get) editors like Dreamweaver or GoLive, you can consult your manual to see how to program within that application.

Third, you will need some method of getting the scripts you write in your text editor to the server. If you are working directly on your own server, you can simply save the scripts to the appropriate directory. However, if you are using a remote server with your ISP or Web host, you will need an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program to send the script to the server. Another option is to telnet to the remote server and use an editor such as Vi or Pico to write your scripts directly on that machine.

From you this book only assumes a basic knowledge of HTML, although the more comfortable you are handling raw HTML code without the aid of a Web creation application such as Dreamweaver, GoLive, FrontPage, or PageMill, the easier the transition to using PHP will be. Every programmer will eventually turn to an HTML reference at some time or another, regardless of how much he or she knows , so I would encourage you to keep a good HTML book by your side. One such introduction to HTML coding is Elizabeth Castro's HTML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide , also by Peachpit Press.

Previous programming experience is certainly not required, although it may expedite your learning, as you will quickly see numerous similarities between, for example, Perl and PHP or JavaScript and PHP.

I l @ ve RuBoard