tailieunhanh - Giải pháp thiết kế web động với PHP - p 3

Chapter 1 What Is PHP—And Why Should I Care? One of the first things most people want to know about PHP is what the initials stand for. Then they wish they had never asked. Officially, PHP stands for PHP: Hyperte x t Preprocessor. It s an ugly name that gives the impression that it s strictly for nerds or propellerheads. Nothing could be further from the truth. PHP is a scripting language that brings websites to life in the following ways: • • • • • • • • Sending feedback from your website directly to your mailbox Uploading files through a web page. | Chapter 1 What Is PHP And Why Should I Care One of the first things most people want to know about PHP is what the initials stand for. Then they wish they had never asked. Officially PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. It s an ugly name that gives the impression that it s strictly for nerds or propellerheads. Nothing could be further from the truth. PHP is a scripting language that brings websites to life in the following ways Sending feedback from your website directly to your mailbox Uploading files through a web page Generating thumbnails from larger images Reading and writing to files Displaying and updating information dynamically Using a database to display and store information Making websites searchable And much more . . . By reading this book you ll be able to do all that. PHP is easy to learn it s platform-neutral so the same code runs on Windows Mac OS X and Linux and all the software you need to develop with PHP is open source and therefore free. Several years ago there was a lighthearted debate on the PHP General mailing list http about changing what PHP stands for. Among the suggestions were Positively Happy People and Pretty Happy Programmers. The aim of this book is to help you put PHP to practical use and in the process understand what makes PHP programmers so happy. In this chapter you ll learn about the following How PHP has grown into the most widely used technology for dynamic websites How PHP makes web pages dynamic How difficult or easy PHP is to learn Whether PHP is safe What software you need to write PHP 1 CHAPTER 1 Download from Wow eBook How PHP has grown Although PHP is now the most widely used technology for creating dynamic websites it started out with rather modest ambitions and a different name in 1995. Originally called Personal Home Page Tools PHP Tools one of its goals was to create a guestbook by gathering information from an online form and displaying it on a web page. Shortly .