Practical PHP Programming:Introducing PHP

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The purpose of this chapter is to bring up to speed on the development of PHP, where it is at now, and the reasons for programming using it. Towards the end of the chapter, you will see you 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.

Chapter contents

• 1.1. Practical_PHP_Programming:History
  • 1.1.1. Practical_PHP_Programming:Background to PHP
  • 1.1.2. Practical_PHP_Programming:Early versions of PHP
  • 1.1.3. Practical_PHP_Programming:Current release of PHP
  • 1.1.4. Practical_PHP_Programming:Upgrading from PHP 3
  • 1.1.5. Practical_PHP_Programming:Upgrading from PHP 4
  • 1.1.6. Practical_PHP_Programming:Who created PHP?
  • 1.1.7. Practical_PHP_Programming:The Zend Relationship
• 1.2. Practical_PHP_Programming:Advantages of using PHP
  • 1.2.1. Practical_PHP_Programming:The HTML relationship
  • 1.2.2. Practical_PHP_Programming:Interpreting vs compiling
  • 1.2.3. Practical_PHP_Programming:The basics of output control
  • 1.2.4. Practical_PHP_Programming:Performance
  • 1.2.5. Practical_PHP_Programming:Competing languages
  • 1.2.6. Practical_PHP_Programming:When to use PHP
  • 1.2.7. Practical_PHP_Programming:When not to use PHP
  • 1.2.8. Practical_PHP_Programming:Selling PHP to your boss
• 1.3. Practical_PHP_Programming:The basics of extending PHP
• 1.4. Practical_PHP_Programming:Introduction to PEAR
• 1.5. Practical_PHP_Programming:Running PHP scripts
• 1.6. Practical_PHP_Programming:How PHP is written
  • 1.6.1. Practical_PHP_Programming:Whitespace
  • 1.6.2. Practical_PHP_Programming:Escape sequences
  • 1.6.3. Practical_PHP_Programming:Heredoc syntax
  • 1.6.4. Practical_PHP_Programming:Brief introduction to types of data
  • 1.6.5. Practical_PHP_Programming:Code blocks
  • 1.6.6. Practical_PHP_Programming:Opening and closing code islands
  • 1.6.7. Practical_PHP_Programming:Commenting your code
  • 1.6.8. Practical_PHP_Programming:Conditional statements
  • 1.6.9. Practical_PHP_Programming:Case switching
  • 1.6.10. Practical_PHP_Programming:Loops
  • 1.6.11. Practical_PHP_Programming:Infinite loops
  • 1.6.12. Practical_PHP_Programming:Special loop keywords
  • 1.6.13. Practical_PHP_Programming:Loops within loops
  • 1.6.14. Practical_PHP_Programming:Mixed-mode processing
  • 1.6.15. Practical_PHP_Programming:Including other files
• 1.7. Practical_PHP_Programming:Abnormal script termination
• 1.8. Practical_PHP_Programming:Editing your PHP configuration

Next: Practical_PHP_Programming:History