apparition.Designs | version 2 | anything you can imagine is real

.Welcome to apparition.Designs [apparitiondesigns.com]

Hello, we are currently under development and are trying to get all our content up as soon as possible. We hope to get the site up, tweaked, and bug-free A.S.A.P. If you have any questions or comments on what you have (or havent) seen so far, feel free to email me at StratzSfear@apparitionDesigns.com

 
 

.Intro into PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor)

PHP is an open source, server-side, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages. In an HTML document, PHP script (similar syntax to that of Perl or C ) is enclosed within special PHP tags. Because PHP is embedded within tags, the author can jump between HTML and PHP (similar to ASP and Cold Fusion) instead of having to rely on heavy amounts of code to output HTML. And, because PHP is executed on the server, the client cannot view the PHP code. PHP can perform any task that any CGI program can do, but its strength lies in its compatibility with many types of databases. Also, PHP can talk across networks using IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, or HTTP. PHP was created sometime in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. During mid 1997, PHP development entered the hands of other contributors. Two of them, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, rewrote the parser from scratch to create PHP version 3 (PHP3). - Google

PHP is now into version 4 and is more powerfuil than ever! Throughout this tutorial I will help take you through the begining of learning PHP and show you what I taught myself when I was trying to learn PHP. I hope this tutorial will keep close enough to the basics that it will not confuse any of you, while being a lot more useful than all those other PHP tutorials that do nothing but teach you how to say hello world!

Also, PHP is NOT a microsoft product, and everything that it needs to run also are NOT microsoft products. And you know what's good about that? Microsoft will generally charge you for all their products, and usually they charge LOTS. PHP and friends is all free.

What this tutorial will covor:
1. Learn some simple notation
2. 'If' 'else' and 'elseif'
3. etc
4. etc

.What you need to know before starting php

The most obvious thing, is to make sure your web host supports PHP. Any good web host in this day and age should, and if it doesn't, it is quite behind the times... If you have your own server, then I suggest the following resources to install it.

If you are wanting to get set up quickly, you can use a pre packaged bundle that will install and configure everything easily on a win32 machine. [Fire Pages] has a great set up. Just download and install! Simple as that. All support questions should be directed to [their forums] or [the FAQ] on their site.

All you people who would like to do it your self, or install onto a *nix platform, i suggest the folllowing links.

[Download PHP] - From php's home page for FREE
[Download MYSQL] - A great, commonly used, FREE, database software
[PHP MyAdmin] - This helps you interact with the MYSQL database, and is of course FREE
[Apache] - A great webserver software

If you decide to go and do it your self, good luck!

.What are the PHP tags?

Delimiters, or PHP tags as they are commonly referred to, are used to identify PHP coding from other types of coding. The default opening delimiter of PHP is <?php, while the default closing delimiter of PHP is ?>. Since these are the default tags for PHP it's good practice to use them when developing your applications. If you switch hosts they may only have the default tags in use, making your scripts useless.

You may also use the shortened version of the default dilimeter which is <? for opening, and ?> for closing. For people coming form ASP you may be glad to hear that those tags (<% and %>) can also be reconized by PHP (even <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="php"></SCRIPT>). To follow good coding practices, please use the <?php ?> version.

Please note that the shortened tags and the ASP style tags need to be turned on. They are not recognizable by default. So if your developing a script using either of them, it may not be widely supported like the default tags are.

Now on to actually playing with some php...