In Chapter 1, I explained that PHP is the language that you use to make the server
generate dynamic output—output that is potentially different each time a browser requests
a page. In this chapter, you’ll start learning this simple but powerful language; it
will be the topic of the following chapters up through Chapter 7.
I encourage you to develop your PHP code in one of the IDEs listed in Chapter 2. It will
help you catch typos and speed up learning tremendously in comparison to less featurerich
editors.
Many of these development environments let you run the PHP code and see the output
discussed in this chapter. I’ll also show you how to embed the PHP in an HTML file so
that you can see what the output looks like in a web page (the way your users will
ultimately see it). But that step, as thrilling as it may be at first, isn’t really important at
this stage.
In production, your web pages will be a combination of PHP, HTML, and JavaScript,
and some MySQL statements laid out using CSS, and possibly utilizing various HTML5
elements. Furthermore, each page can lead to other pages to provide users with ways to
click through links and fill out forms. We can avoid all that complexity while learning
each language, though. Focus for now on just writing PHP code and making sure that
you get the output you expect—or at least that you understand the output you actually
get!
