You’ve heard of PHP and you know of the mighty things that it can do, now you want to dive in and get your hands dirty. Then comes a problem, you do not know where to start. Fear no more. If you are a beginner and want to learn PHP, this post will give you a good place to start.

PHP… Say what now!!

PHP is an acronym that stands for “PHP Hypertext Preprocessor” (I know how weird that sounds). It’s a scripting language that allows your website to be truly dynamic by interacting with a database and other web services. With PHP, you can develop search forms, contact forms, e-commerce websites, user sign ups and login, send email from your website… possibilities are endless. Unlike Javascript that runs on the client side (the browser), PHP runs on the server side.

Why is PHP so popular?

PHP comes with all the bells and whistles and can probably claim to have just about all you need from a programming language. Some of these pros include:

• Cost

  There is no better music to our ears than the word “Free”. And PHP is just that, its free and open source. Am sure it doesn’t come any better than this!

• Smooth learning curve

  PHP is easy to learn and understand, especially for those with backgrounds in programming such as C, javascript and HTML. But even for beginners, the syntax is very easy to understand.

• Compatibility

  PHP is compatible and can run on almost any operating system out there, Unix, Linux, Windows… you name it.

• Community Support

  Because PHP is open source, there is a large community of PHP programmers that help each other with code. Starting with PHP’s own official manual php.net to endless forums and blogs.

• Stability and extensibility

  PHP has a very wide user base and community, hence fast fixing of any bugs and glitches and also numerous extensions exist and more are still being developed.

I could go on and on about the pros of PHP but the above are the main ones. Others include; its ease of database connectivity, PHP 5 is fully object oriented, it is fast, and just loved by many web developers.

Setting up your PHP Environment

Again PHP lives up to all its bells and whistles as most deployment servers and web hosts will run your PHP scripts with minimal or no configuration from you. My interest here is however on local development on your PC or Mac.

For your PHP development and testing, there are easy pre-built packages that come with the Apache server, PHP and MySQL for whichever operating system your using. These pre-packaged installations allow you to have a PHP development environment running in seconds with minimal configuration. And whats more, they all have a free and open source version. Follow the links below to download the installer for your operating system of choice.

• Windows

  The pre-packaged windows build is called WAMP Server (WAMP is an acronym for Windows Apache MySQL and PHP)
  Download WAMP Server 2.0i

• Mac

  Like the Windows version, MAMP installs a local PHP server environment in a matter of seconds on your Mac OS X computer and is free of charge.
  Download MAMP Server

• Linux

  I will not forget the Linux fanatics out there. The link below will tell you everything you need to know to have your PHP Environment up and running.
  Install and Configure LAMP

• Cross Platform

  The good people at Apache Friends have developed XAMPP which works same as WAMP or MAMP but then they have distributions for Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris.
  Download XAMPP for your Operating System

What Next… A PHP IDE

So now your have your PHP development environment all set up and your ready to jump in and crunch the code. You could simply use your integrated Notepad application as your code editor but I STRONGLY advise against. That’s where a PHP IDE comes in.

An IDE is an Integrated Development Environment, simply put, a text editor with additional features to make your coding life easier. These features may include code completion, syntax highlighting, error and warning highlighting, debugging, just to mention but a few.

A couple of PHP IDEs I can recommend include:

• Netbeans 6.8
• Zend Studio
• Aptana
• PDT 2.1

Watch out for my post on a complete review of PHP IDEs soon, comparisons and recommendations

That’s all for now folks

If you were lost about where to start on PHP, I hope this post has shed some light on that and helped you in some way. So, did you benefit from this post? Do you have any suggestions or ideas? Let me know what you think in the comments section

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