“PHP, or Hypertext Preprocessor, is a embedded server-side
scripting language. Not only is PHP’s popularity growing among web
designers, but its features are growing with the release and
development of PHP4. This article will cover the aspect of
basic programming with PHP3, however, since PHP4 is only in the
Beta 3 stage. PHP is embedded straight into HTML code, and is
automatically parsed when the viewer loads a document. It is mostly
used as a module with the Apache web server for Linux; however, it
can easily be used in other OS-based servers such as Microsoft’s
IIS or Netscape’s Enterprise server. PHP can be downloaded freely
at its homepage, www.php.net.”
“PHP is highly similar to Microsoft’s ASP (Active Server Pages)
and Coldfusion. However, PHP is free and cross-platform. As a
combination of C++ and CGI techniques, PHP can send HTTP headers,
cookies, communicate flawlessly with databases, and much more.
Unlike CGI, all PHP requires is a installation and your PHP-coded
files to have the extension .php3 (it can also be configured to use
.php, .phtml, and others.). To implement code, one would simply
start as if you were writing a HTML file….”