WELCOME TO PHP AND MYSQL WEB DEVELOPMENT. In this Training, you will find distilled knowledge from our experiences using PHP and MySQL, two of the hottest web development tools around.
What Is PHP?
PHP is a server-side scripting language designed specifically for the Web. Within an HTML page, you can embed PHP code that will be executed each time the page is visited.
Your PHP code is interpreted at the web server and generates HTML or other output that the visitor will see.
PHP was conceived in 1994 and was originally the work of one man, Rasmus Lerdorf. It was adopted by other talented people and has gone through four major rewrites to bring us the broad, mature product we see today. You can see the current number at http://www.php.net/usage.php.
What Is MySQL?
MySQL (pronounced My-Ess-Que-Ell ) is a very fast, robust, relational database management system (RDBMS).A database enables you to efficiently store, search, sort, and retrieve data.The MySQL server controls access to your data to ensure that multiple users can work with it concurrently, to provide fast access to it, and to ensure that only authorized users can obtain access. Hence, MySQL is a multiuser, multithreaded server. It uses Structured Query Language (SQL), the standard database query language. MySQL has been publicly available since 1996 but has a development history going back to 1979. It is the world’s most popular open source database and has won the Linux Journal Readers Choice Award on a number of occasions.
Why Use PHP and MySQL?
When setting out to build a website, you could use many different products.
You need to choose the following:
- Hardware for the web server
- An operating system
- Web server software
- A database management system
- A programming or scripting language
Some of these choices are dependent on the others. For example, not all operating systems run on all hardware, not all web servers support all programming languages, and so on.
The majority of PHP code can be written to be portable between operating systems and web servers.There are some PHP functions that specifically relate to the filesystem that are operating system dependent, but these are clearly marked as such in the manual and in this Training.
Whatever hardware, operating system, and web server you choose, we believe you should seriously consider using PHP and MySQL.