PHP is a recursive acronym for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor, though it originally stood for Personal Home Page. It is designed specifically for the web, hence a web programming language.
PHP is a server-side scripting language which can be either embedded into HTML documents or used alone. Since PHP is a interpreted language, when someone requests a page containing PHP, the code is interpreted on the server and the output (often HTML) is returned to the client web browser.
As you might have guessed, PHP can help you generate different outputs depending on the conditions and generate different pages depending on conditions programmed, hence able to create what wee call “Dynamic Pages”.
For example, suppose we want to put the current date and time on our web page, HTML alone won’t do any good. So a nice option would be to use PHP (in fact, any sever-sided programming language would be fine. It could also be done with JavaScript but due to it being client-sided date/time is not sure to be accurate)
In the next article we’ll see how PHP code works and how it is embedded in HTML documents, till then Good Bye guys!