PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor.
PHP is a very popular and widely-used open source server-side scripting language to write dynamically generated web pages.
PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. It was initially known as Personal Home Page.
There are lot more things you can do with PHP.
- You can generate pages and files dynamically.
- You can create, open, read, write and close files on the server.
- You can collect data from a web form such as user information, email, phone no, etc.
- You can send emails to the users of your website.
- You can send and receive cookies to track the visitor of your website.
- You can store, delete, and modify information in your database.
- You can restrict unauthorized access to your website.
- You can encrypt data for safe transmission over internet.
The list does not end here, there are many other interesting things that you can do with PHP. You will learn about all of them in detail in upcoming chapters.