Here we would like to show the very basics of PHP in a
short simple tutorial. This text only deals with dynamic
webpage creation with PHP, though PHP is not only capable of
creating webpages. See the section titled What can PHP do for more
information.
PHP-enabled web pages are treated just like regular HTML
pages and you can create and edit them the same way you
normally create regular HTML pages.
In this tutorial we assume that your server has
support for PHP activated and that all files ending in .php are handled by PHP. On most
servers this is the default extension for PHP files, but
ask your server administrator to be sure. If your server
supports PHP then you don't need to do anything. Just
create your .php files and put
them in your web directory and the server will magically
parse them for you. There is no need to compile anything
nor do you need to install any extra tools. Think of these
PHP-enabled files as simple HTML files with a whole new
family of magical tags that let you do all sorts of
things.
Let's say you want to save precious bandwidth and
develop locally. In this case, you'll want to install a web
server, such as Apache,
and of course PHP. You'll most likely want to install a
database as well, such as
MySQL. You can install these individually or a simpler
way is to locate a pre-configured package that
automatically installs all of these with just a few mouse
clicks. It's easy to setup a web server with PHP support on
any operating system, including Linux and Windows. In
linux, you may find rpmfind helpful for locating RPMs.