At long last, this online reference guide has been converted into a book that is now in print.
Tutorial Details:
The purpose of this chapter is to bring you up to speed on the development of PHP, where it is at now, and the reasons for programming with it. Towards the end of the chapter, you will see your first PHP code, as you start writing your first scripts.
If you are entirely new to PHP, you will probably benefit from reading as much background information as you can get your hands on. If you are eager to get on straight away, go ahead and skip pages until you get to your skill level.
The key to understanding something is to know how it got to where it is currently, and PHP is no different in that respect - it has a long history full of key design decisions and changes to the language. The history of web development is even longer - this section will cover both.
Background
Contrary to what some people would have you believe, there was a lot of activity on the web development front before PHP was invented.
In olden times, code to parse form input was generally written in C. While it certainly executed very quickly, it was also very clunky to program - a simple parsing script could easily take up fifty lines or more. The main reason for the length was that C was not designed specifically for the web so there was no pre-written code to take advantage of for common tasks; you had to do everything yourself.
For example, in a HTML form with two text boxes, "FirstName", and "LastName", where the user had entered "Joe", "Blow", the C program would receive
"FirstName=Joe&LastName=Blow". It would then have to read the string in order to find out what variables are there and what they are set to. Of course, this was a great deal better than the situation before - HTTP is a stateless system, which means it saves no data at all across pages, and therefore even being able to use C to send data across pages was a big step forward.
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