[ Thanks to David Culp
for this link. ]
“Before picking up this book I had never even seen a line of PHP
code. I was familiar with what PHP was and knew that it was
something I wanted to learn but had never took the time to learn
it. I wanted to use PHP in revamping this sites looks and
functionality. I was hoping that this book would teach me enough
PHP to do just that.”
“For those that do not know what PHP is I will try to explain.
PHP is an acronym for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor and is a scripting
language. While most people are familiar with scripting languages
such as PERL, Java Script, Shell, and others, PHP is an embedded
server side scripting language. You embed your PHP script directly
into your HTML documents and it gets parsed and run on the server
side, not the client side as in Java Script. If you ask my opinion
(which really counts for nothing) this is a more logical and
flexible way of doing things rather than writing an external
program not embedded in the HTML such as a PERL cgi-bin
script.”
“The book starts out with a better description of PHP than I
gave above along with a short history and various PHP resources.
The authors then dive full force into installing and configuring
PHP for your machine. Installing a program as complex and large
as PHP can be a daunting task. PHP has lots of different
configuration options, some of which will conflict with others, and
you have many choices to make as to how PHP will operate, such
as will it operate as a standalone CGI interpreter or an Apache
module. The book will lead you through setup of PHP step by step
and is quite easy.”