PHP Basics

Abstract

You’re only two chapters into the book and already quite a bit of ground has been covered. By now, you are familiar with PHP’s background and history and have delved deep into the installation and configuration concepts and procedures. This material sets the stage for what will form the crux of much of the remaining material in this book: creating powerful PHP applications. This chapter initiates this discussion, introducing a great number of the language’s foundational features. Specifically, you’ll learn how to do the following:

• Embed PHP code into your Web pages

• Comment code using the various methodologies borrowed from the Unix shell scripting, C, and C++ languages

• Output data to the browser using the echo(), print (), printf (), and sprintf () statements

• Use PHP’s datatypes, variables, operators, and statements to create sophisticated scripts

• Take advantage of key control structures and statements, including if-else-elseif, while, foreach, include, require, break, continue, and declare