PHP for Dummies | how php works? | What is PHP?

Today, We want to share with you php for dummy.In this post we will show you php structure, hear for php for dummies book we will give you demo and example for implement.In this post, we will learn about Toopics Instagram Viewer – php for dummie with an example.

php for dummy
php for dummy

What is PHP?

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML Source. PHP is same to same to Perl and C and is one of the most popular web programming languages.

The history of PHP begins in 1995 as well as the first main version PHP3 was released in 1998. The actual version is PHP8. Although, a bunch of web-server still use version of the PHP7 which is supported only until the end of 2020.

You can run PHP on various operating systems as: Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS

And PHP supports a bunch of web servers as well: Apache, Microsoft IIS, Personal Web Server, omniHTTPd,…

How PHP works? & php for dummie

You can use PHP if you want to create web pages with dynamic content. For example, if you want to display a welcome message depending on the time. You can not do this with a simple HTML as if you navigate to an html site the web-server just sends the content of the page to your browser without any modification.

Although, if you create a PHP site and navigates to it your web-server will first forward the file to the PHP interpreter. Then the page/code will be analyzed as well as depending on the source code a pure html output will be sent to your browser. Of course, your web server needs to be configured correctly to handle PHP scripts.

dummies - Learning Made Easy
dummies – Learning Made Easy

Install PHP for dummy

To install PHP is not a complicated task, however, it can take a long time for absolute beginners. If you want to set up a complete environment with database support you required to install more software on your server.

First of all, you required to install a web-server that is responsible to process user requests. There is a bunch of web-server software on the market but Apache as well as Microsoft IIS are the most popular. Nowadays PHP is installed more often with Apache.

The second software is the PHP interpreter itself. Generally, you only required to copy the files anywhere and set the web-server as well as php settings files correctly.

The last one can be a database server like MySQL. It is not necessary but usually, dynamic web pages use databases to generate content. For example, CMS, forums all use databases to store user details, posts, articles in the DB.

Besides this, you can install other 3rd party tools but they are out of the scope of this article.

As installation and settings of the web-server, PHP interpreter as well as database can be a bit difficult for a beginner it makes sense to install the complete system with an all-in-one installer like XAMPP. With this tool, you can install all of the components at once as well as you don’t have to worry regarding the settings. Besides this, you only need to download one file as well as it contains all necessary components. You can find detailed installation instructions here: Install XAMPP.

After some time, if you will be familiar with web-servers as well as PHP you can choose the PHP manual installation process to have better control over your system.

After that you should have a working web server on your machine it’s time to make your first dynamic website with PHP.

First steps with PHP

If you use PHP you required to write your source code between special tags which tells the interpreter that this part must be analyzed. These tags are the as a closing tag. You can write your source code between them. Each statement of the source code must be separated by a semicolon ; .

So to fetch details regarding your actual PHP settings as well as write your first PHP source code you can make a file let’s say info.php with the following content:


  • and then simple Save the file
  • upload it to your web-server document root folder
  • and navigate to it with your browser

If everything was set up correctly then you will fetch a quite big table with a much of details regarding your actual PHP settings.

In the next step,

you required to learn regarding variables, PHP conditional statements, functions, sessions, as well as so on. You can find more tutorials about this topic on this site.

I hope you get an idea about php for dummies pdf.
I would like to have feedback on my infinityknow.com blog.
Your valuable feedback, question, or comments about this article are always welcome.
If you enjoyed and liked this post, don’t forget to share.

Leave a Comment