Beginner PHP Tutorial - 1 - Introduction to PHP Video Lecture | PHP for Absolute Beginners: From Novice to PHP Master - Web Development

hi this is Alex from PHP academy' org
and this is a PHP video tutorial for the
new Boston now in this video I'm simply
going to talk to you about what PHP is
and why you should use it and a little
bit of information about what websites
do use it so the first thing about PHP
is what it stands for PHP stands for
hypertext preprocessor in fact the first
P is P so it's PHP hypertext
preprocessor that's what it stands for
so we've gotten a recursive acronym
because we have an acronym inside and
inside another acronym because of
rigidly PHP stood for personal homepage
so it's now been changed to stand for
PHP hypertext preprocessor with the PHP
inside of that still it's standing for
personal home page so what is PHP and
why should we use it well PHP is a
server-side scripting language now when
you open up a PHP file and you type in
the code it's not available to view by
the user of the website they cannot
right-click and see your code so it's
not like HTML with HTML being a markup
language it's interpreted by the browser
now PHP and the code inside of it is
interpreted by the web server and
compiled server-side and then the output
of the of the application if you like is
displayed in HTML if we choose to do so
so it's basically used to create dynamic
content on websites so we're not we're
essentially creating a program within a
website so we'll bring it being able to
do a variety of different things now
let's head over to the PHP official
website which is PHP net so if you need
any more information I'm just giving you
a bright brief in overview here go over
to PHP net and you can read some
information about PHP as well as news
etc
cetera etc so we've got a little
description about here about what is PHP
and we've got an introduction
introductory tutorial now the great
thing about PHP is while you're
developing it has a really extensive
documentation to it and this is called
the manual so we've got a link here to
the manual and basically we've got an
online manual for lots of different
languages and you can also download the
doc download the documentation as well
and what the manual will do is we can
search in here for say function list for
example we might search for F open in
the functions list and we see now it
returns a some information about our
function so we can now go down and look
at the different parameters of the
arguments it takes and we can also look
at some examples down here so it's a
really really extensive list you can see
of user-submitted examples as well so
you can get a really great feel of
different functions and not just
functions but everything inside PHP from
this PHP manual so what kind of websites
use PHP and why do they use it well
Facebook for example use PHP what we're
doing is with with Facebook is a social
networking website that's storing lots
of data in a database so what we can do
with PHP is we combine PHP with a
database system and we typically do this
with MySQL and inserting them in the
tutorials I create I use MySQL because
MySQL is one of the widely used and
powerful and fastest databases around so
MySQL is great to use with PHP for
storing data so Facebook is one of the
social networking websites that takes
advantage of PHP as a whole as it's a
really really nice language to work with
a lot of the syntax and structure
similar to C and it's actually
interpreted by C server-side as well I
think it's C or C yeah probably C but
you can obviously prove me wrong on that
if you'd like a home I may be wrong but
yeah this is a brief overview overview
of PHP so if you're thinking about
getting started in it
follow the tutorials that I've created
and you can begin to start creating
dynamic websites and you'll actually
start to realize how easy PHP is the
fundamentals of it anyway we can start
going in to solve the object-oriented
programming side of PHP which is
slightly more difficult because some
people struggle with object-oriented
programming so we do have the
object-oriented programming
functionality within PHP and this was
added from PHP version 5 I believe in
about 2004 so we can use object-oriented
programming inside PHP as well as
recursive sorry not recursive procedural
programming as well as so procedural
structure to our code so that's a brief
overview overview of PHP it's a really
really great language to learn and it's
really really widely used on the web
today so it's definitely worth it