PHP Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples - v5.17, by Herong Yang
What Is PHP
This section describes what is PHP language and what are main features supported in PHP.
What Is PHP? PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, a recursive acronym. It is mainly a Web server side scripting language. But it can also be used for other purposes.
PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 as a simple Web page generation tool named as PHP/FI (Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter). Today it becomes the number one of server side scripting languages. Here is a comparison of number of matches on Google for different popular script key words:
Key words Number of matches "PHP scripting" 400,000 "perl scripting" 371,000 "ASP.NET scripting" 40,100 "ASP scripting" 30,900 "JSP scripting" 17,500
Main features of PHP:
PHP major releases:
8.0 26 November 2020 7.0 3 December 2015 6.x Not released 5.6 28 August 2014 5.4 1 March 2012 5.3 30 June 2009 5.0 13 July 2004 4.0 22 May 2000 3.0 6 June 1998 2.0 1 November 1997 1.0 8 June 1995
Table of Contents
►Introduction and Installation of PHP
Downloading and Installing PHP 7.3 for Windows
"php -help" - Command Line Options
"php -i" - PHP Engine Information
php.ini - PHP Runtime Configuration
Hello.php - My First PHP Script
"php -a" - PHP Interactive Shell
Downloading and Installing PHP Documentation
PHP Data Types and Data Literals
Variables, References, and Constants
Expressions, Operations and Type Conversions
Conditional Statements - "if" and "switch"
Loop Statements - "while", "for", and "do ... while"
Function Declaration, Arguments, and Return Values
Interface with Operating System
Introduction of Class and Object
Integrating PHP with Apache Web Server
Retrieving Information from HTTP Requests
Creating and Managing Sessions in PHP Scripts
Sending and Receiving Cookies in PHP Scripts
Controlling HTTP Response Header Lines in PHP Scripts
MySQL Server Connection and Access Functions
Functions to Manage Directories, Files and Images
SOAP Extension Function and Calling Web Services
SOAP Server Functions and Examples
Localization Overview of Web Applications
Using Non-ASCII Characters in HTML Documents
Using Non-ASCII Characters as PHP Script String Literals
Receiving Non-ASCII Characters from Input Forms
"mbstring" Extension and Non-ASCII Encoding Management
Managing Non-ASCII Character Strings with MySQL Servers
Parsing and Managing HTML Documents
Configuring and Sending Out Emails
Managing PHP Engine and Modules on macOS