<h5>WELCOME TO PHP!</h5><div><p>This tutorial will introduce you to PHP, a server-side scripting language you can use to make dynamic websites and web applications.</p></div><hr /><h5>WHAT YOU SHOULD ALREADY</h5><p>Before you continue you should have a basic understanding of the following:</p><ul><li>HTML</li><li>CSS</li><li>JavaScript</li></ul><hr /><h5>WHAT IS PHP?</h5><ul><li>PHP is an acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor"</li><li>PHP is a widely-used, open source scripting language</li><li>PHP scripts are executed on the server</li><li>PHP is free to download and use</li></ul><table id="table1" class="lamp"><tbody><tr><th><img src="http://www.w3schools.com/images/lamp.jpg" alt="Note" /></th><td><strong>PHP is an amazing and popular language!</strong>It is powerful enough to be at the core of the biggest blogging system on the web (WordPress)!<br />It is deep enough to run the largest social network (Facebook)!<br />It is also easy enough to be a beginner's first server side language!</td></tr></tbody></table><hr /><h5>WHAT IS A PHP FILE ?</h5><ul><li>PHP files can contain text, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP code</li><li>PHP code are executed on the server, and the result is returned to the browser as plain HTML</li><li>PHP files have extension ".php"</li></ul><hr /><h5>WHAT CAN PHP DO?</h5><ul><li>PHP can generate dynamic page content</li><li>PHP can create, open, read, write, delete, and close files on the server</li><li>PHP can collect form data</li><li>PHP can send and receive cookies</li><li>PHP can add, delete, modify data in your database</li><li>PHP can be used to control user-access</li><li>PHP can encrypt data</li></ul><p>With PHP you are not limited to output HTML. You can output images, PDF files, and even Flash movies. You can also output any text, such as XHTML and XML.</p><hr /><h5>WHY PHP?</h5><ul><li>PHP runs on various platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc.)</li><li>PHP is compatible with almost all servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc.)</li><li>PHP supports a wide range of databases</li><li>PHP is free. Download it from the official PHP resource: <a href="http://www.php.net/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.php.net</a></li><li>PHP is easy to learn and runs efficiently on the server side</li></ul><p><em>Now it's time to check out of this course. Have fun! </em></p>